Sometimes

Sometimes

Samson Malmoli

We need to go the other way to get to the right place Sometimes I was feeling like I wasn’t doing enough Or that I wasn’t there Keep taking down the bricks Keep on yelling at me I need to see the robots and the bandages Attached to her head, sprouting My mother was/is alien, foreign, unborn, unknown In this bed in a solitary white sectional area

This is the eulogy of a rose garden This is the past tense of my stress Water shoved down my throat Like the shrieking voice that kept me up and kept shaking me I was haunted by all that I couldn’t do enough of And I tried to keep my message straight and so I found that all I was doing the whole time was keeping And I kept everything in a big pile on my hand like the lawn I could have been thrown out of the house on

In the structure of the waiting-room-dome, it felt church-like At this age when you try to abuse yourself for personal depth I was acting a myth and I was Icarus And the ceiling blocked my approach of the sun So it had to try to take someone else in my place

Like a healthy heart ripped right out from under her skin Maybe the stress I caused Maybe it was really a façade of health I blamed it all on me Every operation, surgery, suffering A prayer or a tear didn’t make it otherwise It was a child’s first balloon Its rubber red shine The string tells the kid that they have a possession So enamored by the flight of it in their hand They don’t realize the balloon can go higher It can float away

But I never even had a nice string to hold The string in my fist was drenched with sweat and torn by heat A hand-me-down like me So I never had the chance to make a mistake The string was set to slip away before I could let go

And in the paintings of the ceiling A street life blowing on Me thinking of last words Something she won’t remember Something I could find that won’t let me just keep anymore