How I Stopped Bombing and Learned to Love the Worry by Francis de Lima
"maybe there are bombs in the world that aren’t metaphors that fall on hospitals."
How I Stopped Bombing and Learned to Love the Worry
Because the book you made was not the sum of enough tears but a bomb I want to be a bomb so bad but I’m a grocery list instead with 17 pounds on my bank account do I have to have money for mascara to be considered a monarch butterfly? I promise I too have migrated across the Great Lakes like the man you love might migrate across your mouth filling it with salt - and I love the taste of a man but you’re not supposed to say it so I poured over vinegar instead like I was in Hurt Locker trying to cut the right wire trying to stop the bomb the barrage the artillery the metaphor and maybe the centre of the bomb wasn’t shrapnel but a child alternatingly mistaken for a boy and a girl who refuses to elaborate or maybe there are bombs in the world that aren’t metaphors that fall on hospitals. And here in the background hum of empire I think I’m the bomb that I’m hot shit I’m the bees fucking knees being fucked on my knees and it’s all quite funny isn’t it - the tab on your tongue becoming an alligator when you said woman and meant something that gets shot out of a gun and meant you and when you didn’t answer a text for over a week my heart fluttered to you as a monarch butterfly look mom I can repeat a metaphor and I cleaned your apartment which was like after a bomb see mom the English degree paid off and I tried to make you sleep jaw wired shut on six pills of Concerta and your heart wasn’t a butterfly but an engine with a missed oil change shitting blood shitting poetry and slurring over your triple vodka lemonade that helped you sleep you said if you want to get into this you’ve got to let go of definition and I did three years later somewhere in North Greenwich I came looking at the London skyline and I finally realised the bomb wasn’t a heavy thing lodged in your diaphragm but this here skyline, unfolding
First published in ONLY POEMS, March 2024.
Francis de Lima, you take my breath away, I've told you once and will keep saying--Oh, how the world needs your poetry!
This is the kind of poetry that creates a space, a dimensionless space where art meets language and flips it off to the point of putting it in its place, diffusing its oppressively normative control over thought and objectivity, a space where freedom allows a window to open into being, that ineffable substance out of which everything and everyone arises and eventually dissolves back into, which is also known as love.