Two Poems

by T!K! Williams


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​Somewhere, there is a Version of Me who Sucks

And she might also have learned to walk twice,
she might have also had three different names
across the years, the ink for each one drying
on the contract a little slower every time she signed.
But it’s not likely.  I wouldn’t say I know her,
but on some level we still taste the same.

We may have caused ourselves the same
problems - I don’t need to be told twice
all the ways my solutions differed from hers,
just that, when she won, she said her enemy’s names
and spat some blood in the sand.  Signed
with almost a kiss.  Coagulating, drying.

The sliced fruits might still be in the oven drying,
losing nutrition but keeping their taste the same, 
inuring themselves to the role they’d been assigned.
You call something sweet in the right voice even twice
and it will forget all its other names.
She could break any skin with the grip on hers.

She never calls the bandages in the closet hers,
leaves them in a pile after her rain, not drying,
attracting spores in the shapes of the names
they would have taken if they’d been used the same.
It’s an easy pattern to fall into – once or twice,
then completely and utterly resigned.

The release forms sitting in the printer tray unsigned,
the adults with balance boards not calling and asking for her,
the body released from friction, turned to ice,
the desperate various and sundrying
to stay busy, to stay ahead of it, to stay the same
and to implore some unearned kindness on her name.

Local anesthetics protect a part of you.  Names
coat every inch, down to the spaces in what you sign.
We’re both oxidizing, but no one heals the same.
I don’t know which stretch marks I could point to to tell her,
but if she hasn't already noticed that her tears stopped drying,
then this isn’t a lesson she’ll need to learn twice.

When you force everything the same, nothing happens twice.
Patterns don't establish.  She never learns the meaning of her names.
A future redesigned, with the same blood still on the ground drying.


Pre-diagnostic Villanelle

All the best archivists and blacksmiths agree:
I am the very model of obsolescence.
Short circuit booming bright red electricity

is the only sound known to echo from me.
A jagged-pulse garden, full in fluorescence,
all the best botanists and engineers agree.

Smaller soil filling space between the scree,
a bed of silent growth and convalescence,
shortcut clearing node of green electricity.

In the summer, watch me closely.
“Brace against waves of her iridescence,”
all the best architects and photologists agree.

I will never be as powerless or free
as when I am stripped down to my essence: 
short bursts to match your heart’s electricity. 

Come garden in a sterile room with me.
Come build a trellis for my acquiescence.
All the best poets and readers agree:
short demonstrations never suited me.

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T!K! Williams is a queer autistic poet based in central Indiana.