I Want to be Alive with You
by Toko-Pa Turner
I want to be guided by older-ups.
I want babies to be born where old people die.
I want to be sandwiched in the middle of a messy togetherness.
I want to be warned before I do something stupid.
I want to be forgiven when I do it anyway.
I want wisdom to be tapped out on my eardrums and not Googled.
I want transitions to be recognized by fire.
I want gifts to be educed from children.
And teenagers and adults and I want to mean something to my community.
I want to get drunk on substance morning and night.
I want to hear your dreams.
I want to raise a revolution for gentleness.
I want to call out the bullshit on consensus reality.
I want to get rich so I can billboard the highways with validations.
I don't want to be another faker.
I don't want to show you my good side and hide my humanity.
I don't want to dole you out my Self in digestible status-chunks.
I want to challenge you in long, drawn-out rituals and still find you interested.
I want to feed you seventeen course meals made with spices I crushed.
I want to recite you circular poems, each beginning cutting a deeper grasp.
I want to make you feel something, even if it's awkward.
I want to sing you songs which are ancient and new.
I want to carve stories in trees with tools my elders fashioned.
I want to keep sharpening them.
I want to find places we've never been.
And then, I want to return there, but backwards.
I want to shuffle up words so we don't sleep through them.
I want to learn things and then be splashed into never forgetting.
I want to make you feel seen.
I want to hold your pounding heart in my gentlest of hands.
I want to make your thing feel like my thing.
I don't want to miss a moment.
I want to dig at the bottom and find it false.
I want to turn up unknown depths.
I want to stand in this hurricane and sing the sweetest,
most naked song you can bear.
I want to be alive with you.
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