Forgiveness, I Am
Eclipsed forgiveness, exploding stars, breaths,
Faithful embers in the midst of shadows.
Forgiveness at our fingertips
Captured by the smoke of
A train travelling down tracks,
Past the house where I lived,
With a piano where I pray
With my fingertips
Of forgiveness,
And let colors immobilize me
In a world of sound.
I have walked down the highway,
Feet dragging,
Without a coat or a name.
I have floated in the air,
A plastic bag
Of iridescence
Against
The sunlight.
I have been hit by cars, carrying
Bodies immobile as I am.
I have carried suicide on my shoulders
And emptied myself in a furnace of thought.
I have made love on the sand
And shivered with the wind.
I have trailed off into the sunset
And returned with the Solar Sinai.
I am an ocean of stars
In a garden of galaxies,
The universe’s windmill,
A shard of sky, a mosaic mirror smashed
Into all happenings
_____
Darkness, When I Have Found You
Gaze into the wall of wanting a lion to sing
But find my body in a branch unsung
It is singing in the night, darkness.
You have sung for far too long.
Stretch my anthem into the abyssal highlight.
Blot out the sun and ask Why isn’t it shining?
You have overshone your hands into the rust
and the cards you’ve been dealt is a blow
to your head.
Where do we go from here,
when the spirit of the universe has our way
with us?
Where do we go from here,
when I tell you, I love you and you and I both
know that only means skipping stones across
the pond of poison?
I look at you and am penetrated
by thought, by the insistence to go on living,
thinking that everything will be all right,
that the world will ripple against the great lake
once again.
But once again I have deceived myself into
deception.
And deception is just a feeling I get
when I want to throw myself away
skip my bones across the woeful weeping
with a whisper—
the whisper that orchestrates
a symphony of stars,
that hums humanity into my eyes,
when I see myself
running
running
heading for the hills
running
running
running away from home
running
running
waiting for the silence to begin
waiting
waiting
for the stars to depart.
Why can’t I brush the skipping stones
of my body from my bones?
I ask myself as I penetrate the mirror.
The mirror speaks silence, my bones
bent into the shape of blood.
And Blood is capitalized
because zealots have told me to do so.
And I follow them because
I am running
running.
And waiting,
waiting.
Waiting to run and running to wait
down the river into the lake
where I skip myself, my soul, a sky:
the only place that matters
where I found you crying—
crying into darkness.
_____
BIO
Joshua Corwin, a Los Angeles native, is a neurodiverse, 2-time Pushcart Prize-nominated, Best of the Net-nominated poet and Winner of the 2021 Spillwords Press Award for Poetic Publication of Year. His poetry memoir Becoming Vulnerable (2020) details his experience with autism, addiction, sobriety and spirituality. He has lectured at UCLA, published alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti and read with 2013 U.S. Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco. He hosts the poetry podcast “Assiduous Dust,” writes for Oddball Magazine and teaches poetry to autistic addicts in recovery at The Miracle Project, an autism nonprofit. Please visit www.joshuacorwin.com.
