The You in Someone Else’s Poem (poem)

Maybe I should volunteer

to be the you in someone

else’s poem. I’m tired of being I

all the time, constantly it in a game

of syllabic tag. It might be fun

to see what sort of character

I’d become -- a caricature

of my true self, perhaps, or

worse -- the unflattering, darker

half ruled by the split in my Gemini/

twin personality. Maybe I’d become

exotic, deviant, undefinable.


Or maybe I’d be defined

as a she-devil: one moron-

in-the-guise-of-a-man labeled me

as such once upon a time

because, he said, you never listen;

how devilish of me, I suppose.

I’ve been called a silver bullet

by a Communist friend who giggles

and won’t explain who I’m out

to kill, except he’s sure me, his

contraband, will be seized

by some Stalinist Big Brother

and eliminated for his own

giggly good. I’ve tricked massive

floods of people into calling me sunshine,

a name slipped into my senior yearbook

as a joke, but a joke I still take seriously,

even five years later, still willing to be

the sun: bright and furiously feeling

the heat all the time. I’ve been overlapping-others’ Spanish

Señorita Sarita wicked and winking,

playful and cruel, and my roommates

tell me you’re not someone

I’d fuck with.


But to be defined by a poet,

maybe I need to sit on a stool

in the center of a writers’

workshop and fling my hands

in the air, let my too-thin hair

slide across my eyes and see

what sort of artsy model

I can be without taking my

clothes off. But, then again --

Maybe I need to take my clothes off,

bare my skin, become a vulnerable you.

Maybe I’d be able to stand back

from the finished product and see

myself as a work of art, ready

to be hung on a wall of words

and stared at, loved by, someone.

Maybe I could be coy or trendy or

passionate or quiet or impish or, simply,

ready for my close up, my poet/creator.

Then maybe me as you could be me,

somehow. Maybe -- maybe.

Maybe.