Teaching Ink
Some of us are yelling a lot more
than we were before
just because it’s louder
and what’s louder is heard
for a body that has so many nerves
that the brain has to
turn a few of them off
so we don’t always shudder,
so we don’t always picture
far too much for the frame of one
of so many moments.
But you are like feeling
the socks in my shoes,
just like the kind I keep
even when holes wear through.
And I have been tempted
not to write a poem about you
because I know you practice
letting things like poems go.
But the other night you showed me
the patterns you have on your skin
and you let me trace them
while the rest of the bar caved in.
So I have come with this paper
not to disrupt any pattern,
but to show you how
to draw another one,
but not to presume
that you need me to,
and then to learn the guts it takes
to make it out in ink,
to admit that you can change
what you think,
but that no part of a life
ever really washes off.
- Amy Madison
