I Sing the Body Electric Especially When My Powers Out
Andrea Gibson
This is my body; I have weather vanes
They're especially sensitive to dust storms and hurricanes
When I am nervous my teeth chatter like a wheel-barrel collecting rain
I am rusty when I talk
It's the storm in me
The doctor said someday I might not be able to walk
It is in my blood like the Iron
My mother is tough as nails
She held herself together the day she could no longer carry my niece
She said
"Our kneecaps our are prayer-beds, everyone can walk farther on their kneecaps
than they can on their feet."

This is my heartbeat
Like yours, it is a hatchet.
It can build a house
or tear one down.

My mouth is a fire escape.
The words don't coming out
cannot care that they're naked.
There is something burning in here
When it burns, I hold my own shell to my ear. Listen for the parade
When I was seven, the man who played the bagpipes wore a skirt
He was from Scotland so I wanted to move there, wanted my spine to be the spine of an unpublished book
My faith, the first and last page
The day my ribcage became monkey-bars for a girl hanging on my every word
They said, 'You are not allowed to love her.'
Tried to take me by the throat to teach me I was not a boy
I had to unlearn their prison-speak, refuse to make wishes on the star on the sherif's chest
I started wishing on the stars in the sky instead
I said to the sun
tell me about the Big Bang
The sun said, 'It hurts to become.'
I carry that hurt on the tip of my tongue,
and whisper 'Bless your heart' every chance I get
So my family tree can be sure I have not left
You do not have to leave to arrive,
I am learning this slowly
So sometimes, I look in the mirror
and my eyes look like the holes
in the shoes of the shoe-shine man

Some days, my hands are busy on the wrong things
Some days, I call my arms wings
Well my head is in the clouds,
it will take me a few more years to learn
that flying is not pushing away the ground,
but safety isn't always safe
You can find one in every gun.
I am aiming to do better
This, is my body
My exhaustion pipe will never pass inspection
And still my lungs know how to breathe
like a burning map every time I get lost
behind the curtain of her hair
Find me by the window,
following my path to that trail of blood in the snow
The day I opened my veins the doctor who stitched me up asked me if I did it for attention
For the record, if you have ever done anything for attention,
this poem is attention, title it with your name
It will scour the city bridge every time you stand staring at the river
It never wants to find your body doing anything but loving what it loves
Love what you love
Say 'This is my body, it is no one's but mine.’
This is my nervous system, my wanting blood, my tongue, tied up like a ball of Christmas lights
If you put a star on the top of my tree, make sure it's a star that fell. Make sure it hit bottom like a tambourine. Because all these words are stories to the staircase to the top of my lungs where I sing what hurts. And the echo comes back
'Bless your heart. bless your holy knee-caps.’
They are so smart
You are so full of rain
There is so much that is growing
Hallelujah to your weather vanes
Hallelujah to the ache, to the pull, to the fall, to the pain
Hallelujah to the grace, and the body, and every cell of us all
Write the lyrics for a misc song made in 2011, titled "I Sing the Body Electric Especially When My Powers Out", by artist "Andrea Gibson".