our poetry month celebration continues today with a prose poem by the great Walker Smart. catch him reading at the Poetry Party in denton, texas on April 22! Walker's creative prompt is one that could be put into practice any day or any month: Tomorrow, don’t eat or speak or read until you’ve written a little poem or scenario. Remember, wanting creates tension and tension lets art stay with you.
Confession for my first love the Moon
I’m too afraid to be an astronaut, but I long to study bodies —all these stellar bodies moving through the infinite. I set up camp a little ways north of Taos on a ridge above two wild rivers rushing to join each other. They soothe a lullabye below me and I am as close to the edge as I can bear, so close the above has taken the below into itself and everything I see is sky. Glowing coals warm me while dying embers shine. I am not afraid of heights, but it takes courage for me to walk so close to the black ink well of your night, where my body might join in dance with the satellites.
The word for rivers meeting helps me name my fear: Confluence—where I am no longer only me. I’m sucked into the everything. It's too dark to know the violence of their merging, but the rivers carved this gorge from stone, and over thinking this changes the tone of their cradle song into a self sung eulogy.
I need to press my back into the ground, dig my fingers into dirt. I won’t let go of the Earth. Lying makes me vulerable to sleep, yet another warm embrace that startles me to fight or flight. Resistance burns my chest.
If you fall asleep — this voice is part of me —you will wake up in the sky — a fear I carry with me — sink into the night — Moon, you know I can’t — no, i know you long to join me
Walker is a writer and performer in Denton, Texas. He is currently seeking a sugar parent—one so generous he can support a few sugar children of his own. He is, perhaps, barely a poet.
Walker Smart at spiderweb salon's forth annual masquerade | photo by Brian Doore | 2016