Poetry Suite by Micah Fletcher
“Even forest fires have a season.”
Poetry by Micah Fletcher
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Righteous Graves
Last night, a dead friend showed up in my dreams.
“I’m not angry, Micah,
I'm just disappointed.” He was
bleeding from his nose, his eyes, his mouth,
and it struck me; you could smell the rubber on him,
tire tread was a cologne, somewhere in the distance, was
a man who carried him to a hospital but wasn’t able to carry him
home, and a mother-sans-a-son’s cry echoes, and I weep with them,
because now he reminds me that all he wanted was to watch the world
burn, and right now, I have the audacity to place a fire extinguisher on his grave
and call it a greater good.
When I woke up, I remembered my rage
has made a burnt cathedral of me,
that these angry hands played arsonist
on everything they touched
once upon a time. That sometimes
we do things we hate because our arms
are tired from digging righteous graves
under the banner of cold empires,
and that flames come from coals,
coals we must carry in our heart.
Even forest fires have a season.
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Cold-Empty-After
Marcus told my mom I was stabbed in the arm.
I didn't know you could feel gratitude in the midst of dying.
It got cold, so I tried to stare at a sunny sky and pretend that I lived in the light.
I tried to remember what Pastor Glenn used to preach about,
when he spoke about the light of the lord.
I don’t know if Light is in my cards.
Small talk was exchanged to distract me from a child’s blanket pressed against my neck
with the weight of every empty promise pledged to me in this life.
Can’t accurately tell you how long before
an officer knelt down by me
and asked me about something or other. Can’t remember.
Was too busy begging him not to let me freeze. To die.
To pass into whatever this shiver running through my everything was.
Don’t remember his answer. Maybe “That's not my job. I don’t want you to die
but I rarely have a say in fate’s designs.”
Maybe he reminded me that I live in the land of bootstraps and self-starts,
and that salvation was up to me.
I just remember that I finally didn’t wanna die.
I don’t know why anymore. I mean—
I do.
The Cold-Empty-After of it all is an eldritch dread we only feel
in the slight fabric of space between awake and asleep—
but the world is falling down on its face, turning over,
and watching the light drain out of the eyes in everything it ever loved.
Swanson shot themself in front of their partner last year.
The bits of their pain they left behind floated through the air,
landed in the minds of a few men with a car
who subsequently ran over David in a fit of rage.
As David was dragged to his friend’s van nearby, it left a stain,
a trail one would say. The slimy trail of all a man’s hope leaking from his body
as he realizes, he will die. And when the city washed it off the cement,
I know they were trying to do good. To clean the shame off the asphalt.
To wipe away reminders of what loss looks like. They couldn't have known
that the essence of the death would leak into the groundwater, would fall in
Scout’s cup. That he would drink it one night,
lay down with the woman he loves
and never wake up again, with no clear reason,
not even a coroner’s note.
I am trying to remember why I feared dying.
But I don’t have a very good memory.
And there’s no one here to hold my hand,
look me in my self-righteous anger,
and tell me comfortable lies
like empty lights
in a sunny sky.
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Vibration, and Pleading
I am trying to have sex with a person whose eyes
are dusty from a long, long road.
I am reminded that the world is a rose-bush
and I have now fallen past flowers to thorns.
All I wanna do is cuddle, watch this fuckin movie,
and if lucky, give and receive some head inbetween.
But it’s a horror movie—
some campy shit about a redhead werewolf,
and we’re at the point where the meat-hook
of her face has some poor bastard’s neck
impaled on a promise I didn't make
that was kept anyways, see—
sushi-chefs practically give me seizures
just doing their job in front of me.
Now sound is a memory, a bowed string.
There is sustain, and vibration, and pleading
like a child in a man asking a god for a chance—
She asks if I'm okay. If this is okay.
Like there are any good answers in my skull,
words worth wringing out of my tongue.
“Yeah, it’s fine. Just trauma, ya know.”
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Sorrow’s Aqueduct
When I tell you
that the only Peaceful Protest I believe in
is biding your time and waiting
for the perfect moment
to strike,
I need you to know
my body has been all the surfaces we cut things on,
that people have prepared feasts on me,
I am the walking example
of why you teach your children
self-defense,
that it’s always okay to fight back
because one day, they’re going to learn that truth
with or without you.
And believe me,
you want it to be with you. The physics
of violence is something that every person must understand,
a different language, a dissonant bilingual manifesto.
Speak fist-prints
in the privacy of a gym.
You don’t want 22 to be the year
your kid learns the definition of regret,
that holding back is for cowards, and
cowardice gets people hurt,
and killed, and you will miss them,
even if it isn’t your kid,
even if you never met.
You will stand at strangers’ graves,
and you will sob until your chest turns
into an accomplishment of hydrodynamics,
until you become the greatest aqueduct
sorrow never asked for.
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Make a Legacy
My father's tears fall lopsided, the rolling water
makes less of a sloshing sound,
more of a plea bargain.
It’s a beautiful sound, it makes the sky bend.
I am young still, and I have no idea
what brings men who bring men into the world
to the point where they are crying in front of their legacies,
telling us they love us, like we didn't know that.
We have the bruises to prove it.
My father is a good man.
He just wasn’t ready for it. He misses mom.
It’s not that she’s gone, it’s just that
age takes small things, slowly, over longer periods.
It’s a patient thief. Time isn’t kind to many of us, but
my father always keeps the time anyway.
He’s good like that, punctually doing things.
If a Buddhist and a drunk had a one-night, made me,
it would be my father. And my father is crying
because nothing feels fair. But I can’t even build dams
tough enough to hold my sea of thoughts.
How the fuck am I supposed to build something magical
like a father’s arms, like an apology you waited years for,
something strong, like a promise kept,
like picking your fuckup eldest child
from a mental ward in another state after he overdoses,
finding out he has spent the past nine months
locked in the dark corner, with nothing but a straw
and a sex drive to keep him company,
that he is broken, that this is the new normal,
and not so much as raising a decibel
of the volume of your voice, for what must have felt
like one of the longest drives of your life?
I can’t.
I just eke out the last bit of the kid inside of me that didn’t die,
stuff it through a voicebox, tell it that we’re playing hide and seek,
watch it scrabble out of my mouth,
hiding out in the open the way only children can,
as a single sound, a whisper,
“I love you dad.”
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Loam of Tomorrow
We buried a hatchet in a stump for the symbol of it,
to remind ourselves that trees fall.
The groves grow green with our tears
and the forest holds a thousand birdsongs
all in the key of heartbreak.
Our hands are full of the best we could give.
It slips between our fingers, fine dirt falling to soil.
This will be the loam of tomorrow.
This will heal the scars of the earth we walk.
And maybe, if we stay lost in the forest
for long enough, we’ll find
what we’re looking for.
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Header image courtesy of Nathanial Evans. To view his Artist Feature, go here.
Micah Fletcher, also known as Kool Chief Rocker, or Rocker for short, is a nationally recognized poet and spoken word artist who took first place in Portland Oregon’s city wide youth poetry competition called Verselandia in 2013, and has opened for acts such as Shane Koyczan. He has been featured at Wordlights and other poetry themed events in Portland Oregon
Photo by Wymon Smith
(Instagram: @wymonday)
