Saeed Jones Quotes

People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.

I was proud of my exhaustion, as if the darkness circling my eyes was proof of my adulthood. Proof that I could hold my own, no longer just a son or grandson but an I.

He seemed to thrive on creating a sense of order, on understanding the tasks to be taken care of.

Reach high for the stars that hidden in your soul. Dream precedes the goal

A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

Too much had happened for me to keep waking up surrounded by the lie of continuity.

I felt swept along, swept past. It annoyed me, how easily she was able to pry me away from myself. When I put down the phone, though, my frustration curdled into shame. How could I begrudge the woman who raised me on her own? How dare I, when she had found it in herself to keep loving her own mother through decades of ups and downs?

Who are you the morning after the most beautiful man you have ever kissed tries to kill you? And the morning after that? How about the following week?

I believed that I could control any story I told. If something happened, I could write about it, own it, resolve it. Simple. You could afford to be interesting, if you could pin everything to the page afterward.

"I don't watch the video
but I can feel it playing

on a loop in a room miles
away from where he keeps

dying behind my eyes. All
I have left are tiny twitches,

small choices. "Please," I beg
alone in the box of my dark,

"I don't want to hurt that way
today. I already hurt that way

yesterday. Please don't kill him
again.

I buried myself in the bodies of other men so I could feel something other than the depression that was rolling in like a fog bank.

I’ve lined my throat
with the river bottom’s best
silt,

allowed my fingers to shrivel
and be taken for crawfish.

I’ve laced my eyelashes with algae.

I blink emerald.
I blink sea glass green.

I am whatever gleams
just under the surface.

Scoop at my sparkle. I’ll give you nothing
but disturbed reflection.

Bring your ear to the water
and I’ll sing you

down into my arms.

Let me show you how

to make your lungs
a home for minnows, how

to let them flicker

like silver

in and out of your mouth
like last words,

like air.

The sweetness we deny ourselves because the world is wailing.

winter stars stitched into puddles

THE BLUE DRESS

Her blue dress is a silk train is a river
is water seeps into the cobblestone steps of my sleep, is still raining
is monsoon brocade, is winter stars stitched into puddles
is goodbye in a flooded, antique room, is goodbye in a room of crystal bowls
and crystal cups, is the ring-ting-ring of water dripping from the mouths
of crystal bowls and crystal cups, is the Mississippi river is a hallway, is leaks
like tears from windowsills of a drowned house, is windows open to waterfalls
is a bed is a small boat is a ship, is a currant come to carry me in its arms
through the streets, is me floating in her dress through the streets
is the moon sees me floating through the streets, is me in a blue dress
out to sea, is my mother is a moon out to sea.