Poetic Gladiators

My mother is deciding whether to sleep upstairs or down. 16 stairs up or 16 stairs down. It doesn’t really matter, as both are hard on her knees. She discovers the ‘T-Zone Vibration Technology ‘ 16 stairs down and that decides it. Stepping gingerly onto the footpads, she sets the display to ‘Fat Burn’ and hits ‘Start’. It rocks, low and slow, not what she expected but that’s why she stepped up. For the unexpected.

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…“THIS FADED AIR, TORPID WIND, GENERATIONS OF BONES IN THE DIM LIGHT…” From another room at the front of the house, I can hear her… “THIS FADED MIRROR, PATTERNING THE EMBERS OF MY FACE…” As she rehearses for a spoken word performance, I’m reminded of the first time she cracked her soul open with the power of language…“I WILL DESCEND TO THE RIVER, TO THE BED OF STONES, THE SADNESS OF LEAVES, FLOATING…” There’s no one in the house but she and I and yet—I feel as if the whole world is watching.  My 80-year-old mother is flaying herself in the middle of my friend’s living room and all I can think is, “What if someone hears?”

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“Don’t think too much, don’t second-guess, go with your gut.” We’re writing together in a cafe in Inglewood and she notices I’m uneasy. I make poems in the solitude of my own home, where there are no persons raising judgey eyebrows over their coffee cups. “Okay, I’ll start,” she offers. Her prose is intense, dark, frightening—as if daring me to be her counterpoint. Dipping my words into a well of honey, I parry her with an optimism honed from years of practice. We spar like poetic gladiators, she with the spear, I with the shield; I with the spear, she with the shield, and the metaphor of our relationship is not lost on me.

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