The Day You Fall Asleep to a Revolutionary’s Autobiography

The day you fall asleep to a revolutionary’s autobiography
Is the day you know you have gotten old
No Botox for this botched youth
So you pack up your New Haven apartment and go
Not to cold, hard New York, which already aged you in your college years
With rooftop wine bars and business brunches al fresco and Brooklyn
Fucking Brooklyn
But home
You go home
Call it a holiday
Your underwear and unread novels stay unpacked in your suitcase
You tell your mother she is not allowed to resume raising you
You start to haunt your old altars
The downtown Fayetteville library
The passenger seat of your Trinidadian best friend’s SUV
You consider part-time jobs in chain restaurants, the local Cinemark theater
Anything to give you time to think, sleep, play
You go out every night
Southern rap and soul food at that questionable club in College Park
House music and ecstasy downtown
You come home sweating, reeking of exertion and a cologne you wouldn’t wish on anyone
You get no younger
You wait for Peter Pan with soap under your heels, start praying to him and the latest dance gods
Your childhood church is full of conservatives
You don’t remember it this way
You walk on eggshells, take thorns to the side
Preserve their meticulously structured Sunday in its glass box, as heavy and fragile as bird bone
Slowly, you remember how it feels to be angry
But everything has been considered before
The African-American guy you’ve been giving a chance already knows he still bears a slave name
A spoken word poet has already written an ode to polar bears falling in love as the ice melts
Everyone knows marijuana laws are not about morals, they’re just about racism
You think all this meditation will lead you to revelations
Pray lying in the grass in your backyard
But your mom’s dogwood is not a bodhi tree
You can’t climb to nirvana so you keep your mouth full of silence
You don’t even start a blog
And you hate yourself for it
You think about moving forward
Watch the dogwood grow a beard of snow, then age in reverse
Become green and hung with fruit
You want to age in reverse
You don’t want kids any time soon, but you want more than anything to bear fruit
It is a shame to be twenty-two and think about retirement this often
To wake up tired this often
You start sleeping with the sun
Try to tune your circadian rhythms to something more primal than your iPhone alarm
Unanswered emails in your inbox seduce you with visions of work-friends-weekend
But routine is what put you in this rehab in the first place
So you wake up
In the middle of the night
Listen to the chemicals reach orgasm in your brain
Your veins run warm with the exquisite stories you could tell
In words or technicolor or 3D printed dance routine
You start the day doing drugs
Tall, foaming cappuccino
Caffeine to slip you out of that yesterday skin
Leaves you laughing in this lonely communion with your own thoughts
It reminds you of the gurgle of a baby
Delighting in the virgin electricity of her own mind
Its synapses closing around impressions of this new womb
Stitching itself together before her like the strokes of an Impressionist painting
You remember the first time you had a favorite color
The first time you confused the notions of color and love
The last time you confused the notions of first sight and love
That was the last time you got angry
It is 2:34AM, and you are awake for your pleasure alone
The night sky is bloodred purple
Your favorite color
You’re still re-learning how to pray
But you make your best offers to the universe
You promise that your art will serve purposes greater than yourself
That your dreams will take root and grow into dogwood trees
And your most vivid ambitions will stay nestled in your third eye