7 Mutations of Jon Chin
1.
My bones remember yesterday.
They burn in their softened state.
The memory of muscles so perfect
that this is a passive act in learning.
The skeleton does all the work;
it even self corrects, heals over
stronger where it’s done been cracked.
My mind is lost to possibilities
(poet, programmer, president?)
while the skull whispers to itself
protect, protect, protect.
2.
When I could wrap my whole hand
around the 1st bone in his thumb
Dad said I still had a long way to go.
He had too much faith in the act
of growing, understood this only
as a journey of height, that when I
was tall enough to look him in the eye
that I’d have the same depth of character
he had. No.
3.
and God, I miss my ex. The space
between her hips could fit
a universe atomic terrific.
To be defined by what
your body lacks, a void
you’re meant to fill, to grow.
She told me once, after a night
of non conceiving,
that women’s veins were closer to the skin,
that all my girlfriend’s hands will be cold.
4.
Isn’t this just sitting in ash,
praying for rain, waiting for the sun
again and again and again?
I subscribe to a biological god,
the 1 who gives my cells their names,
who draws the bones their road maps.
5.
Why do firetrucks
bolt through the streets
on rainy days, their red
and white sirens ablaze?
Won’t the clouds throw down
their whole weight and melt that care away?
6.
I would sit on my hands
until they disappeared
then study the dead weight.
Shoulder, elbow, and wrist,
this chain of evidence
promised something existed there.
Then the blood would flow back
1st gently like a candle
then searing like needles,
the pain of remembering.
7.
This is to forget and be forgotten.
