Number 2 (and all that signifies)

Today I've yanked my prompt -- 12) Write a poem in the form of a message or letter to your future self. -- from the next website on the Google "poetry prompts" search: http://www.creative-writing-now.com/creative-writing-prompts.html.  Looks like there are lots of good ideas there. Hell, there are lots of good ideas everywhere.

*

Letter to my Future Self

Now that you are truly an old woman and

not just faking it for yourself and unamused friends,

it's time you faced reality (such as it is): 

you will never

conquer your fear of travel. 

Oh, you want to pretend

that you inherited Tutu's and your mother's spirits of adventure,

certainly, and their open love for others,

but you were always a good liar to yourself. 

In fact,

                 it terrifies you -- foreign languages, foreign streets, all those

seething stories in unreadable bodies,        burning fields, the smell of shit

     human shit where you might step in it the thickest despair

                        broken glass        broken concrete          twisted rebar

their harsh smiles their laughter behind fists their sometimes

tortured-looking limbs 

                                         their sudden nakedness and what you imagine to be

their disease 

                       the sound late at night of their singing in English happy birthday

happy birthday to you 

               

               and how in dreams they still glare at you from broken doorways

               houses that mushroom up from gathered scraps

               so you know you are their white devil

               as they mark you with an animalistic dream anger that

               smokes its way right to your

               rotten American core --

For years you've tried to be good.

You have that in your favor.

But there's a reason you loved that bigoted old fart, Eliot, 

his xenophobic

apocalyptic visions 

of cultural explosion, 

a reason you stumbled over his snobbery 

and embraced it

as an 18 year old returned to her country --

a reason you fell in love with 

his cruel Aprils, his 

empty shantih shantih shantih,

his fearful cracked hordes.

You dream his dreams. His words are

tattooed on the insides of your sagging eyelids.

For over 80 years you've tried to be the kind of person

who flings herself into alternate lives

and you've failed, you've failed

again and again,

harboring inside that wrinkled skin

the ugly elephantine American 

you were born to be,

hot bloody fear coursing 

with First World Order

(like super highways round 

sleeping suburban cut outs)

out from your

expensive American heart.