I have to live

BOOKS BY AISHA SASHA JOHN

The Shining Material (2011)

THOU (2014)

I have to live. (2017)

Copyright © 2017 by Aisha Sasha John

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

John, Aisha Sasha, author

I have to live / Aisha Sasha John.

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-7710-5070-1 (paperback). – ISBN 978-0-7710-5071-8 (epub)

I. Title.

PS8619.O444I12 2017 C811′.6 C2016-904537-4

C2016-904538-2

Published simultaneously in the United States of America by

McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

Library of Congress Control Number is available upon request

ISBN 9780771050701

Ebook ISBN 9780771050718

Cover design by Rachel Cooper

Cover image: © Tuja66 / Dreamstime.com

McClelland & Stewart,

a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

a Penguin Random House Company

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

v4.1

a

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THOSE WHOM IT IS FOR.

AND TO MY DAD.

Contents

Cover

Books by Aisha Sasha John

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

ONE

Something softens me

And a withering pear I can’t eat.

Considering

I have to live. There’s stuff inside of things.

What is bread?

In the dream

I sleep in a room.

In my nipple is an eye.

I am in love.

Dec 31, 2014

Aquamarine and topaz

Everywhere there are men, there are men

When I leave here I don’t know where I am.

TWO

I like it when we give the world to itself

Ruth taught me M.G.’s dance in which one imagines herself held by a giant blue woman named Eureka

I can’t believe I agreed to go to work today.

I fold in half

One headline said 5 minutes early is on time;

I am an angel but I respire.

“The Bay Area”

Advanced Adulthood

What’s the big fucking deal about

Today I could aspire but I want to nap

Your yes, yes.

Adornment is exaltation enacted.

It’s Saturday. I meet you, get soft.

I spread butter on the darkest rye

My duty is to tend

He thinks I should be glad because they

His thumbs were

Because I was being flown to Kelowna for a reading and he lives in Nelson

Regardless

THREE

In August I visited my Gran.

Strong basic love

Happy Cup

I defer to you.

Blood

RAT VS. LAMB

A beach.

I was born and I lived

I wore a mint-green Donna Karan suit in the Lincoln LS commercial.

The landlord said he lost his phone.

I want to walk the park with you

Hi.

I take a medicine.

I decided that I was a planet and I was a planet.

The crease

I said no

So I have a brand new set of markers

FIVE

I was a born a baby.

Eighteen degrees Celsius

The goat

I cut my horns

My anger is hope for my own righteousness.

The coo of the common emerald dove is the sound of Venus.

I have to live lest I die-live.

It’s why I was born.

SIX

I told you.

How much of your body is your head.

The trick to being funny by Aisha Sasha John.

I couldn’t win with my brother because I was born.

Thanks.

I’ve seen stuff always.

For you and all your siblings and friends and husbands or boyfriends.

SEVEN

I removed the snake ring.

Pussy pain.

The reassuring thing about life

Psychic = Self-believer

The year of being selfish. The year of being relaxed.

I find the book.

I get my power from pleasure.

And I get my pleasure from pleasure, too.

I’m on the back of something.

I’m not dead.

I’m not gonna die of love.

I have to live.

I’m married to love.

Acknowledgements

This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:

I warmed some hash in butter and wiped a yellow square of cake into it deeply.

To most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the printed page, you may choose to decrease the size of the text on your viewer and/or change the orientation of your screen until the above line of characters fits on a single line. This may not be possible on all e-reading devices. Viewing this title at a higher than optimal text size or on a screen too small to accommodate the longest lines in the text will alter the reading experience and may cause single lines of some poems to display as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

What would I write if I were going to live?

One

Something softens me

Softens my desire

Something helps me breathe

Something spills out my pores as light

Something

Is like hope blanketing me

Something bleeds as me:

Tea on the cuff

Of a blouse in the day

Lazing at the sink.

I scratch my head to flakes.

I return to

My reading.

The first knowledge is of our ignorance.

Hi.

What’s seeable and not

I join

For those to whom I’m betrothed.

I am the bride of your listening.

And a withering pear I can’t eat.

It’s messy.

I have to eat.

Because I love.

I put my life on my body.

It’s hungry.

I do it

Because it’s hungry.

I’m lazy

And I barely even read.

Why should I know what I’m talking about

When I can merely feel it?

You have to worship the fact of life and not its

Corny by-products.

Art is for romantics.

Art is for stupid people.

It’s believable.

When you sin it is believable.

You have the evil fingers.

You have creation light, too.

You’ve been so sorry.

Why have you been sorry?

Think about what life has done to you.

When you think the good are to be rewarded

You reveal your essential stupidity.

I am asking you to take that cover

Down.

I hate a white sky, bare trees, Ontario-ness, winter.

I keep saying I submit and do not.

I have to attend to my pussy.

I have to attend to my heart.

It’s true I hardly know what’s going on

And can’t let that full fact go.

I’ve let my thoughts virgo as

Detective work

Though I have to have problems I suppose

To tenderize

My sweetness.

Or else I would have a

Very, very hard sweetness.

Considering

As a way of being.

I have done that.

A decided

Closeness

With the

Materials

Of a circumstance.

I like have been close to

What’s arrived and

Arriving: I saw

Everything.

And I listened to

Some, many.

I listened to a great deal

And with a placid intelligence

Supported

The odours entering me.

I smelled; thus

I knew.

I could smell

In this Friday blue hour –

An approach to

Night as it

Isn’t night:

I can’t see the sky

From where I’m sitting

But I see

The colour of the air

Around the cactus

And the colour of the air

Around the

Red soil

And I know what the sky is thinking:

I see it turn itself

To closing, so I –

Good night –

Can leave this room

Where the vibration of a resting cellphone

Is a fart

In the, now,

Night –

I have to live. There’s stuff inside of things.

There’s a fridge in the staff kitchen.

And there’s stuff inside that fridge

That isn’t for me to eat but I want

To eat it.

A sound.

Is there

Someone behind me?

No ok I want to eat what I left at home then.

I am glad that I left it

So that

I can eat it –

The centre of a blackberry

It’s like eating butterfly body, basically.

What is bread?

Is bread women?

Is bread youth?

Is bread sorrow?

Is bread

A marshmallow?

What is bread?

In the dream

I didn’t want to give him the $20 on my dresser.

Days before there weren’t

And then were snakes

Of blue, red, and lemon

Ejecting from a hedge

Maze, a garden.

I want on a walk.

I want

Every morning

The damp, loose soft

Of the sky.

I sleep in a room.

I store clothing there.

Outside my room is a hallway

That leads to a door

Beyond which

Is a street

In a city

In a world

In which I live too.

I live in this world.

I live

Today.

I’m of a time.

It will know its name when

It is over.

When I am dead this time

Will be an object

And I

Will be an object

Too.

That’s okay.

Right now I am alive

And

I like it.

My boobies are soft.

There’s a vast

Coldness behind my waist.

The sky.

In my nipple is an eye.

I would do it.

I would do it like you.

I could have it.

I could have it like you.

I am in love.

But I only cry about it when I’m hungry.

When I die I’ll just be me again

And soft.

I look outside.

A city street.

I look at it. I am it.

I look outside.

I have to.

Because I

Like everything.

Dec 31, 2014

I have left prime sweetness

Between the tight teeth

Of some hurried days.

Let me now keep it.

Jeez, it’s the année’s

Final creeping night.

My name is A’isha

But has it

Kept its promise.

I lie on the bed.

I lie very still.

I cry.

Aquamarine and topaz

Cast as the eyes of

Sick and slow-moving cats.

I was high and I was lost.

I was slow and found

I was low and found.

Everywhere there are men, there are men

Loving other adults.

And everywhere

There are women

Same.

When we were alone in the night

The light

Of your small shop called me.

I bought bottled water

And a loofah.

And then dans la même square the next day

He said

No, I said

No, wait –

He said,

D’Afrique?

Des Caraïbes, I say, Mais

Oui. I point to the rhombus

That’s the back of my hand:

La même chose.

Who said that?

I don’t even know

If you said it or if

I said it.

You said it.

And then I said

Hamdulillah

And you said

Hamdulillah

Too.

I went

South.

I forget.

I remember: ok

The thing

Wasn’t that it was tight

And that I was breaking out of a case

And transiting forms

And that there was a cover that

Cracked

And the line

Was the tear of that

The rip in that was the line –

No.

The caterpillar actually dies

Becoming the whatever.

A line.

It is a fiction.

An idea

Of direction.

An index.

The line.

An idea I breathed

Automaton-ically

Across campus

And shook –

Wearing heeled boots to class

Who did I meet but

A rectangle of

International development gals.

The motherfucking line.

The blood

Runs from where it begins

Into the lake that’s

My left foot.

It feels like

Wind inside me.

When I leave here I don’t know where I am.

I read the map wrong and got lost.

So I was home.

When I was physically lost that was home so I am crying.

I’m not crying.

The reason I’m not crying is I don’t care.

I warmed some hash in butter and wiped a yellow square of cake into it deeply.

And I put it in the mini fridge and the next morning, the next

Afternoon –

I ate it.

“Slowness is a formidable power;

It has the passion of immobility

With which it will someday fuse.”

Number one – and

Two:

That to study philosophy

Is to learn how to

Die.

Two

I like it when we give the world to itself

Folding it to it

Like a soft-shelled taco. Hi, God.

I said in the photo’s caption.

It’s Aisha.

I volunteer.

I do.

I did it.

I did.

I had to.

I have to.

I have to live.

Ruth taught me M.G.’s dance in which one imagines herself held by a giant blue woman named Eureka

The performance of which

Begets the knowledge that I’d been dancing as if

Alone

An axial dance

Rotating on a centre inside myself (like a stick or a stalk) but with

Eureka behind me

The axis was everywhere

Which made me think of my mom

So I b-lazed

And then shaking upward from the floor to my crown felt

Generations of pain.

And then an image of my mother laughing hard and bright

Quizzed me

And from my feet again

To, this time, my halo

Generations-of-joy waves

Pulsed

And a door swung open in the centre of my chest

Revealing a giant passage

For of

Love

I can

Could now

Take it.

That was June.

I can’t believe I agreed to go to work today.

That was so dumb of me.

I hate money.

And I hate sitting down.

I fold in half

Documents destined for the shredder.

I leave flat the ones to be scanned into patient charts.

I consider how long stickers have rested on the glass

Protecting me from potential

Disease and violence

Of the people.

The first time I came here I was late, I was scolded

I was bleeding.

I barely even cared

Fuck, look:

When I start to bleed

I have to eat.

One headline said 5 minutes early is on time;

On time is late; late

Is unacceptable.

The other headline said optimists are usually late.

The last said cultural differences

Around time something-something.

I took a screenshot.

I wonder what the point is though when I can

Merely live.

I am an angel but I respire.

I drink a cold red juice.

It’s Sunday in the truth study centre remember when I was sleeping, freezing

And so put my cashmere coat on upside down?

And reached down and from the floor of your room

There black and soft inside my grip was a jacket made of rabbit and I made my

Face and shoulders smooth in it?

“The Bay Area”

The hallway.

It was a good hallway – light. It had air.

I said to her our destiny

Is beyond this hallway – and

What did we see outside?

A man.

I climbed to his stoop and I sat beside him.

I rubbed his back. He was old

And small.

He was telling me something important

That I don’t remember

But I remember that then he said something that made me stop