The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.
 
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”
 
The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.
 
The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.
 
The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”
 
The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.
 
The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”
 
But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”
 
My bones said, “Write the poems.”

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean
there is a mass twice the size of Texas
formed entirely from the trash of plastic.

There is four hundred pound sea turtle
about about to swallow what she thinks
is a jellyfish.

We say jellyfish have no hearts.
We say we do.

Jesus said “Forgive them father
for they do not know what they doing.”

Is that true?
Do we not know what we have done?

Over five million people have died in wars in the Congo
fighting for the minerals that make our cell phones.

A tactic of this war is to rape the women,
then cut off their lips and arms,

and AT&T can still convince me

to reach out and touch someone.

I’ve been performing poetry for over 10 years. I always get nervous. That’s why I stopped reading poems off of paper. My hands would shake too bad to hold on to the page. I heard once that the degree to which you are nervous for an event is the degree to which you respect it. If that is true, I have an enormous amount of respect for every stage that holds my feet these days, and yes, I think that’s true. There are few things in this world that make me feel more blessed than a room full of people with generously open ears and hearts. So many mornings, like today, I wake up and think, “I cannot believe I am doing this for a living!” That said…lately I’ve been thinking about a show I did in Brooklyn years ago. It was a small space, somewhat of a house concert, but not quite. I was performing with musician Chris Pureka, who is a good friend. It was in my first year of touring and because it was a small room and a small space I treated the show as such. When I read my poems I read them to fill a small room and didn’t give them the energy or the heart I would give to a larger
crowd. After the show Chris called me on my energy….told me that if I had intentions of making any sort of career out of poetry I could never ever treat ANY show like a small show, reminded me that every audience deserves the full presence of a performer , and anything less is a real slap in the face to the integrity of the art. In all the feedback I’ve been given throughout the years, that night sticks with me the most. Check out chrispureka.com –go to a show—and see what I mean. Love.

“I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that’s becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism. “
-bell hooks

“Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.”
-bell hooks

“We love disasters that have nothing to do with us”
-Mark Doty

“If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.”
-Micheal Jackson

“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”
- Sal Paradise from Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”

I know some people get a whole lot of rocking in the rocking chair
and the ones who don’t sometimes get rocks in their voice boxes,
and their voice boxes become slingshots.
maybe you think my heart looks like a baby squirrel.

but you absolutely missed when you told the class I have head lice
‘cause I one hundred percent absolutely do not have head lice
and even if I do
it is a fact that head lice prefer clean heads over dirty ones
so I am clean as a whistle on a tea pot.
my mother says it is totally fine if I blow off steam
as long as i speak in an octave my kindness can still reach.

my kindness knows mermaids never ever miss their legs in the water
‘cause there are better ways to move through the ocean than kicking.

so guess what,
if I ever have my own team
I am picking everyone first

even the worst kid
and the kid with the stutter like a skipping record
‘cause I know all of us are scratched,
even if you can’t hear it when we speak.
my mother says most people have heartbeats
that are knocking on doors that will never open,
and I know my heart is a broken freezer chest
‘cause I can never keep anything frozen.

so no, I am not “always crying.”
I am just thawing outside of the lines.
and even if I am “always crying”
it is a fact
that salt is the only reason
everything floats so good in the dead sea.
and just ‘cause no one ever passes notes to me
doesn’t mean I am not super duper.
in fact, my super duper might be a buoy or a paper boat
the next time your nose gets stuck up the river
‘cause it is a fact
that our hearts stop every for a mili-second every time we sneeze
and some people’s houses have too much dust.
.

some people’s fathers are like attics
I’ve heard attics have monsters in their walls and shaky stares.
I think if I lived in a house with attic
I’d nightmare a burglar in my safety chest
and maybe I’d look for rest in the sticks and stones
‘cause my mother says a person can only swallow so much punch
before he’s drunk on his own fist

but the only drunk I ever knew
was sleeping in the alley behind our church
and jesus turned water into his wine
so even god has his bad days

but on your bad days couldn’t you just say
“hey I’m having a bad day,”
instead of telling me I’m stupid or poor,
or telling me I dress like a boy
‘cause maybe I am a boy AND a girl
maybe my name is Andrea Andrew.
so what.
it is a fact that bumblebees have hair on their eyes
and humans, also, should comb though everything they see.

like
an anchorman is not a sailor.
like the clouds might be a pillow fight.
like my mother says,
“every bird perched on a telephone wire
will listen to the conversations running through its feet
to decide the direction of its flight.”

so I know every word we speak
can make hurricanes in people’s weather veins
or shine their shiny shine

so maybe sometime you could sit beside me on the bus
and I could say,
“guess what, it is a fact that manatees have vocal chords
but do not have ears.
and Beethoven made music
even when he could no longer hear.

and I know every belt that has hit someone’s back
is still a belt that was built to hold something up.

and it is fact that Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone
but it’s not hard for me to dream
that maybe one day you’ll write me back
like the day I wrote the lightening bug to say,
I smashed my mason jar and I threw away the lid.
I didn’t want to take a chance that I’d grow up to be a war.

I want to be a belly dance or an accordion or a pogo stick
or the fingerprints the mason left
in the mortar between the bricks
to prove that he was here,
that he built a roof over someone’s head
to keep the storm from their faith,
my mother says that’s why we all were born.

and I think she’s right.
so write back soon.
sincerely yours.

I want to merry you. Yes, I do.

So it’s merry season and over the next week I’ll be on tour for a few dates at Mount Holyoke College in MA, Elmhurst College in IL, and Webster University in St. Louis, MO for a World AIDS Day Concert.
All shows are open to the public and I would love to see you there! Find details at my site: andreagibson.org

In other news I am currently working on my 5th full length CD which will be completed late winter. I am also working on my 2nd book to be published by Write Bloody Publishing. If you love poetry check out the phenomenal list of writers at Writebloody.com

Thank you so much for your support. Hope your December is filled with carrot-nosed-snowpeople!

Love.

Andrea