dear ms. rupert

At 11 years old stretched out on a cold doc­tors of­fice ta­ble, sur­round­ed by doc­tors and nurs­es, naked, in the most vul­ner­a­ble po­si­tion that a hu­man be­ing, much less, a child can be in
they told me
I would nev­er have children.

And it wasn’t un­til the oth­er day that I un­der­stood why.
Af­ter my po­et­ry class took the stage at the museum
I must have beamed with the kind of pride fa­thers have watch­ing their sons learn to walk.
I had to fight back tears as they thanked me for help­ing them over­come their fears and ex­press themselves.

At 11 years old I picked up my first note­book and scrib­bled the sen­tence “I want to die” over and over again dig­ging hard­er into the page with every let­ter un­til the page ripped be­cause that was the only com­fort I could find.

When god felt too far away to touch the only seren­i­ty I could ever see came in the col­lege rule lines on a page who’s only pur­pose was to listen.

And though those note­books nev­er wiped my tears they nev­er saw me as dif­fer­ent either.

As I stand in front of my po­et­ry class I re­mem­ber miss rupert’s portable at Palm Av­enue el­e­men­tary school in Was­co, Cal­i­for­nia. I imag­ine it must have been April be­cause that’s the only time pub­lic schools teach po­et­ry. She asked the class to pick a col­or and write about what that col­or sig­ni­fied and how it felt.

While every­one else wrote about spring greens or sun­ny yel­lows I chose red. The red rep­re­sent­ed anger. Like a vol­cano ex­plod­ing. That’s all I re­mem­ber of the poem. That and the way miss ru­pert looked at me from some­where be­tween fear and pity and said, “it’s a good metaphor but you should try to be a lit­tle happier.”

So at 27 years old, with no wife and no kids I watched my po­et­ry class tell a room full of adults how they were Mar­tin Luther King’s dream as my chest welled up with pride. A stranger walked up and said, “those kids re­al­ly love you.”
Those words rang in my head all night re­plac­ing the decades old echo of dr. ear­lichs old jew­ish voice crack­ing as he said “ren­der­ing him un­able to have children.”

With­out that day on that ta­ble and those years and those blades and those drugs and all of it …
I wouldn’t have made it here.
With all twen­ty five of my kids.

As I walked out­side as not to have every­one see what an emo­tion­al bas­ket case I am i caught the sun go­ing down as a com­fort­ing blue en­veloped a ra­di­ant or­ange. Some­how I hope miss ru­pert hears this when I say that yes­ter­day felt halo­genic. So far be­yond col­or it makes white look black if that makes any sense at all.
And if it doesn’t
just wait
and it will
in time.
 

—an­dru de­f­eye, 2012

Flom­mist An­dru De­f­eye is the Guer­ril­la Poet Lau­re­ate of Sacra­men­to. Copy­right © 2012, 2018 An­dru Defeye.

MOR D’ARTÍCULOS  MOR FLOMM !

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