Love even lives in an empty Sanctuary, shoe soles echo through heating vents older than Jerusalem. Constantly moving, the air embraced the already sticky pews riddled with foreign fingerprints pressing for prayer. A welcome pamphlet stuck out the pew number askew to the left as if curious or pointing. The whole building seemed to travel cyclically, from the optical illusion of eternity in the ceiling all the way down to the powerful pillars that traveled back up through the organ pipes, resembling a giant baby's first recorder. Not a sound in earshot but for the prayer pillows possibly knocked while taking a seat. They were just wide enough for a knee and a tear, they hung on a hook at the ready, like a coat that finally can rest when you get home and turn on the light. Yet how can illumination have diction? As if light bulbs didn't exist and stained glass had a wattage, the windows burst with colors not found in science or pigment; the story walked on walls to the pulpit and rested at the top in a column of three in gold. I don't know exactly why I cried. Maybe it was because a sanctuary is never truly empty.
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1. Cobble stone streets lend
to nostalgia but do not support learning boots. 2. American tongues are sharper than most countries . Adjust to silence. 3. Blood pudding involves dried blood sausage and science. It’s not a cookie. 4. The Scottish accent is a song with a beat. Learn rhythm not words. 5. I have learned to like potatoes and walking and beauty constantly. 6. Parties are weekly Monday through Sunday so sleep is option and choice. 7. Pubs pubs and more pubs. Ginger ale whisky and brew. Pubs pubs and more pubs. 8. The sun rises at 9 sets at four so learn to walk in darkness. 9. They were right to say the chill seeps into your bones You can’t run from it. 10. New countries are hard to wear like places you’ve worn before so be calm. I woke up feeling clean.
The kind of clean you find on your teeth, after they have picked and scratched and scrubbed them to that white hue with sharp tools we are all afraid of using ourselves. The inner lining of my skin is now smooth and finally worth leaning on. I feel clean. I am sure this is what it feels like. Because to know clean you must first be friends with filthy, an acquaintance of crummy and a distance relative callous. I have known these things as they have stuck to my being before, made my insides rust and flake off in a flurry of inconceivable nightfall This I know. I know both. Today, I can perceive and receive a morning of clean, with hands visible to the valley in my own fingerprints exposed and extended, almost transparent, almost fragile, almost open, almost there. Reaching for my being Clean and clear I guess the thing that eluded me first
was words. Poetry didn't flow out of me like a divine diarrhea (waiting for an open mic stage where people are half listening and half going over their poems praying you don't read another one). Is it because poetry didn't know which pore to seep out of and witness for herself just how lost and found I really am? I have no idea what I am seeing for the first time and I am without stanza or cause Empty. Like tears that aren't mine. I have felt fear for so long What better to replace it with than Jazz on rustic historic stone shining pebbles that dare call themselves a street in Edinburgh. So far from home. How many hills quietly sit or stand
in fog maybe or saturated in rainfall? How many of those green hills– So green that you forget that money use to rule you– How many of those mounds of grass barely grazed, barely walked through or driven upon, How many of those are waiting for me? Next to a brown road (no need to pave what doesn't have secrets) that winds arounds like a belt or miniskirt no words, just road. How many of those do you think I can run roll down or walk in a progression until I reach the Horizon? the source for all the patience the hills have carried all these years How many hills on an unknown Scottish countryside marked by the tiniest of the sun to hit the top of one– How many are waiting for my back or bum to rest or stand against the wind looking forward (only forward) How many of those moments are waiting for me How many of those are calling me to just get up and go. It is easy to be an entire country
when you do not have to take responsibility for what it stands for. I can't explain our obsession with football– a sport we created and coincidentally are champions at– anymore than I can explain why we find organic joy in butchering people's names with gusto and pride. I have never had to be an American until now I never had to carry the history in an introduction or a beverage ( Shirley Temple). I never had to make excuses for decisions I didn't choose to make Do all countries have to go through this? Do all nationalities have that legislation to carry, that story or is it just America. Americans that have to shrug off the questions and gestures that ask Why the fuck are you the way you are? What answer would be most appropriate? I am not the one who made America, I just hold the foundations of its forgotten beginnings. |
Tayllor JohnsonThis is my reality as I see it in stanzas as I study Psychology, English, and French in Scotland. Archives
May 2014
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