The Hawk Kitchen 9:14am
Can You be In Love with The Spirit
of a Child?
What stops You as He
approaches 25 years of age
& You finally decide
to throw out
His First Bathtub Toy
set on a block of concrete
for the garbage men to pick up?
In The Sun Today
I Walked The Pattern Of The Waves
& Looked Across The Sand
To Sea The Breakers
But To Hear Their Over-turnings Muffled
Out Of Reach Of The Wind
Rippling The Clouds Outside
My Kitchen Window
When I Got Home
The Tomato-coloured Couch 1:11pm
I live with A Demon
of My Own Creation
caged above Me
in My Living Room
He is black & dirty
with giant bird shit
dripping off the upper right corner
of His Chicken Wire Cage
first laid across Him
on the 4th Floor
of Cooper Union’s Foundation Building
where He came to Life
never to speak — only to glare
with His Brilliant Eyes
down upon His Audience —
Yet Today He Speaks!
Through Me as I speak out
for The Creature of My Fierce Fear —
My Fear of being locked in
or up
or out
as I have been locked inside
psychiatric wards
for years on end
I am OUT NOW
& I can speak My Mind
no matter how It comes out
I AM BLACK JESUS — but
not because I am dressed in black
I AM BLACK JESUS — because
I can speak
for My Desperate Crow — d
Last Night I slept on The Hide-A-Bed
in Eliza’s Corner Room
My Husband was coughing badly
so I got up & out @ 11:00
to open The Hide-A-Bed
& make it up with cheap Egyptian sheets
& a satin cover I made in My First Marriage
never used
I pulled up the shade Eliza always has down
& lay on My Hide-A-Bed
looking up to The Sky
awash in star glitter
In a Barrington Passage car park
I listen to 90’s on 9
“That’s Me in The Corner
That’s Me in The Spot Light
Losing My Religion”
— I listen to 90’s on 9
to reclaim the decade
stolen by My Mother’s Brain Tumour —
is this another Dead Mother poem
or My Reclamation
of What I’m OWED?
Making up for months & months
of psychiatric hospitalizations
of years of being so depressed
I couldn’t take care of My Children
of writing a 364 page Manuscript
— The Encapsulation —
only to gleefully shred It
— every copy I possessed —
on a sunny June afternoon
fifteen years later?
Joanna Gilman Hyde 