Autobiographical poems for students

If you read my biography
You will learn how to fall in love
every second
You will hunger for kisses
every second
Illusions will take part
and
you will be a married man everyday
Your lips will not kiss lips
but thorns
Your nose will not smell rose
but butts

If you read my biography
You will die everyday
You will question your existence
from a woman’s body
You will learn how to hate women,
even the ones that choose your thigh
over your lips

If you read my biography
You will learn that the mirror is
unfaithful
If you doubt, place it under the sun
You will stop dreaming
because
you will become a living corpse when
sleep comes

If you read my biography
you will see the thousand miles of
Africa
you will draw with water
to measure love’s fidelity
You will see your beauty, scattered
in the four angles of the world

If you read my biography
You will see colours of eyes closed
You will see hope, caged
The memories I won’t tell you
are the memories I won’t imagine.

SELECTED POEMS

Autobiography

Like most of us, I can’t remember how
I was separated from my first love.
(Did it die, did I break it, was it stolen
Or did it fly out through the open window?)
I didn’t have radio-tuning parents
Who filled the house with music
Or instilled in me “a love of the cinema”.
I never recalled my mother coming home
From the hairdressers’ with a new hairdo
Or father teaching me fishing, or
Staying up to watch football on TV.
He did once bring a kite home but hung it
On my bedroom wall (he turned it into
A portrait, it wasn’t his fault the wall
Never became more of a sky). Meanwhile
Cousins came for visits wearing braces

And chattering about comics, bicycle scars,
And camping out, ghost stories (don’t tell
That one, tell the one where Daddy used
The torchlight and Mummy screamed and dropped
Her things and laughed like a hyena). We drank
Boiled water in the house, and sometimes
Waking up from a nap I would wander the rooms
To find mother copying cross-stitch designs
From a book or father watching a subtitled
Chinese re-run. So I slept again, dreaming
Of pla

•

Nearing Autobiography

Those are my bones rifted and curled, knees to chin, among the rocks on the beach, my hands splayed beneath my skull in the mud. Those are my rib bones resting like white sticks wracked on the bank, laid down, delivered, rubbed clean by river and snow. Ethereal as seedless weeds in dim sun and frost, I see my own bones translucent as locust husks, light as spider bones, as filled with light as lantern bones when the candle flames. And I see my bones, facile, willing, rolling and clacking, reveling like broken shells among themselves in a tumbling surf. I recognize them, no other's, raggedly patterned and wrought, peeled as a skeleton of sycamore against gray skies, stiff as a fallen spruce. I watch them floating at night, identical lake slivers flush against the same star bones drifting in scattered pieces above. Everything I assemble, all the constructions I have rendered are the metal and dust of my locked and storied bones. My bald cranium shines blind as the moon.

From Eating Bread and Honey, published by Milkweed Editions, 1997. Copyright © 1997 b