Tag Archives: Josh Gaines

It’s Not Insomnia by Josh Gaines (Published Gloom Cupboard Jan 2012)

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Good morning Constance.  I am posting a poem of my friend Josh from poetry group.  He is one of the nicest people I have ever met, and a fantastic poet too.  I really admire his work.  For those of you with me, he is the author of that poem Grace and the Space Between…the one that I had such a strong affinity for that he said it is now belonging to ME!  lol!

Anyway, he read this one a few months back…it stayed with me, and I post it here for your pleasure.  Somehow, it captures that strange moment when someone who knew me previously discovers that things are transitioning with me…

Grace and Peace, Charissa

 

It’s Not Insomnia (Published Gloom Cupboard Jan 2012)

“It’s not insomnia
That’s keeping you awake.”
Shaking his head
With two fingers
On the pulse wrist.
“You’re just dead
And didn’t know it.
There’s nothing we can do.”
The doctor wrote down
A time of death.
He rounded up
Like it didn’t matter.
“You’re dead,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“But I just feel tired!” I said.
“Give it time,” he said
“You’ll come around.”

I walked away
With a certificate of death
And a prescription
I couldn’t read.
I wondered what it was.
At home, my dog
And my wife were missing,
Like somehow everyone knew
I had died.
People apologized to me
Or cried, or drank to my memory,
But the bar wouldn’t serve me.
“Look I can pay you in two days!” I said.
“You’re dead,” they said
“Your credit is no good here.”
When I slept,
I dreamed of being alive.

I had to move some place
Where no one knew me,
Where no one could tell.
I started wearing all warm colors
Even in winter.
I started picking dead people
Out of crowds.
I found where all the dead people
Go to hang out;
I can’t tell you where it is.
If you were dead
You’d just know.

I filled the prescription,
But the pills didn’t seem to do anything.
I called my doctor
And he refused to talk to me.
They said he’d taken it real hard,
Gave me a number to call
For an embalmer,
Who was also dead.
The doctor’s office sent a refill script
In the mail—
The note with it said, “We’re sorry for your loss.”

You can keep me in one of your cages and mock my loss of liberty

 

Grace and the Space Between (by Josh Gaines)

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This poem is by another friend from my spoken word group…I bought his book, and was reading along until I hit this poem like Thelma and Louise hit that cliff…over the edge I went and into the gulf of wonder regarding how someone could write a poem that was about me, but yet had not met me when the poem was written!

I read it over and over…and over again…and cried…yeah, huge surprise!  Charissa is crying again!  LOL

Seriously, I was soo amazed.  So I wrote to Josh to tell him about how the poem was mine!  🙂  In the process of that, though, I recognized a poem in the email that I had composed, so I pried Prose’s fingers off Poetry’s slender ivory throat, and “Deaf Earth’s Denial“ was the result.

I give you now the genesis poem for that one…

Grace and the Space Between

Grace dreams in the shapes of clouds
Of the spaces between
Here and highways
Willing to wilt in the sun
On the thirsty river roots of cypress
Whose bows, living between her
And her dreams,
Decide to shade her anyway.

Grace dreams in the movement of dust
Climbing the sun that sneaks through curtain-covered windows
Swirling in ghosts
In dreams she twirls with them.
The mattress beneath her smells of second hand
Like salt-water, grass and motor oil.
Some dust settles over her heart
When it sees she has no blankets.

Grace allows form to the formless.
She calls out the names of shapes
Yet to be invented.
She remembers: Between every space
Is the note that binds spaces,

And behind every cloud is the shadow she casts on the sun
Carried up on sun dust song wings
When she sings.
When she sings.

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