Heartache in Remission by
M i c a h To r e y P a r k e r
Heartache in Remission by
M i c a h To r e y P a r k e r
© 2021
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Dedication
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iv
Preface
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vii
Acknowledgments
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ix
He Knows Me By Name
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2
‘Til Spirit Do Us Part
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3
Emotional Afterlife
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5
In Memoriam
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7
I Offer You
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10
Ancestral Livingness
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11
An Antithetical Baptism: Thine Omen
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14
As Seen at the Pulpit
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15
Self-Reimagining
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16
Black Ash
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18
Afterword
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22
Dedication This book of poems is dedicated to my mother who consoled me in my time of grief and sadness during and after the production of this poetic collection. A Black woman who saw through to make sure I was okay. A Black woman who I admire because of her sacrifice of time, energy, and spirit to ensure the safety of my well-being. To a fierce warrior unlike no other who stood beside me in my times of darkness. The moments where I wanted to give up, but didn’t. The voids I covered, but she unmasked to live and tell that things were going to be okay. There’s nothing in this world more candid than the Black woman. For that, I am thankful.
iv
An ode is like a soft silhouette that dances on the tongue, living to tell on an intergenerational story passed down from my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother — — Micah Torey Parker
Preface Herein lies the heart of the matter of darkness and plight. Pages upon pages where the soul takes lead and tears run off my face. Forming puddles of stanzas and words; precarious emotions. Lines that sustain both life in death and death in life. Pieces of the soul broken into shards that cut my lips which bleed out into stories of recovery through pain and sorrow. Herein lies the heart of the matter, of darkness: the inability to sleep. Therein, the retention of deep waters become misguided by love or a lack thereof. This is a space where my shadows become ignited by flames through the act of processing in theory and practice, treading lines of revelation. I implore you the reader to dive headfirst into my world, and see what I saw to break what is broken and to build and destroy again.
vii
for the ancestral mothers both here and gone who light the way. for the Black women who permeate every aspect of my life. for the mute to become outspoken. for the spirits that walk with me to rejoice. for the pain that produced art. for the tender love and care from community. thank you.
ix
Such fondness withered by destructive afterthoughts both in memory and loss.
He Knows Me By Name
‘Til Spirit Do Us Part
I was still in my intimacies. I fell into myself. A soft, gentle abyss of darkness swamped by the iridescent glow of my demons.
We both departed from each other. Depressed, countless nights spent wrestling through sheets as I continued switching between the fetal and natal position.
Therein I lied, drowned in my thoughts and unfinished memories. Fond memories of your eyes as they whipped the sides of my face as my body lied in still motion. I was captivated, but I was torn. Conflated by your transgressions, elated by your presence, but distant because of the baggage you carried. Insofar, I fled.
I would lie there. I wondered where the buck had stopped. I wondered where the thread was cut. I wondered where the love was lost. I made nicks on the walls of my eyes. I counted, and recounted the times I wandered in pain. I drowned myself in pools of sorrow and query. I was unable to fathom the loss of another both in spirit and intimacy.
As time passed our spirits converged. I reimagined myself in your embrace. Two bodies, physical and spiritual beings. Materialized diasporas created from within an intellectual conclave. I cried of this departure of body and spirit. To know that it was nor ever meant to be.
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Heartache in Remission | 3
And even though I gave you parts of me, I would rather drown in my tears, and suffocate underwater before confessing my love to you (again).
Emotional Even a room never the
after full
of
emptiness
Afterlife we parted a thousand eyes account I
ways could for carried.
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In Memoriam Even after we parted ways, a room full of a thousand eyes could never account for the emptiness I carried.
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I Offer You
Ancestral Livingness
I didn’t think redemption was possible. I didn’t think that living was fair. I was surprised I lasted this long given my age and life expectancy as being Black in blue.
I find my revelation to be a dialectic. Between then-future, between self and spirit, between body-soul. The physical self as the altar venerated by incantations and poured liquor.
I float, in theory. I sing behind the souls of an ancestral army. I struggle to breathe. I struggle to exist in the conclave that is life. To think, I could have ended it all years ago.
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Heartache in Remission | 11
An Antithetical Baptism: Thine Omen
As Seen at the Pulpit
The summer’s breeze makes for brittle skin at winters wake and death’s door. Ones dying wish, in ceremony. Awakened in amniotic waters, washed from the sin of yesterday only to sin again for another day.
Let this divine unification between human and spirit be that of a holy sacrament. The breaking of bread, the washing of feet, of jubilee and body-mind-spirit. Spiritual perpetuity bonded by the abstract of time and self.
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Heartache in Remission | 15
Self-Reimagining
Dying is the body of water that withers gray. The ocean from which I am permitted. The seas from whom I exist where death becomes the altar at which I pray.
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In so that I bare the ocean, so that I can paint the sea. Of tranquil levity, a gothic undertone unfurls beneath earth’s wings. Therein, I cry a glorious hallelujah.
Heartache in Remission | 17
Black Ash I ripped the scriptures from the Holy book. I’ve drunk the wine from bare hands from which I’ve slurped. I cut half of my heart for your sanity. I wrote your Exodus. I transcribed your commandments. I translated your soul. I’ve inscribed into your eyes the bearings of a false prophet. One at the dominion of thy perishables, cracklings of peeled scabs and interior forestry. Lush gardens of your own sin as they choke, rip, and pry at your vessel. A silent tragedy befalls you, written in bone and marrow. To wither by my hands is a divine order only God foresaw.
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Afterword It wasn’t easy to complete Heartache in Remission given the emotional labor it took to formulate the aforementioned poems. The words you read, the pictures you saw, the shapes that were digitally created were all symbolic of how the affect is influenced by emoting the physical, psychological, and spiritual bodies through death. Within the confines of this book, death is used in the sense “to shed.” To conjure the emotions, accumulated through experiences, to denote inflection through revelational key points in one’s life. That, to me, is the true essence of Heartache in Remission that was written during and of a time where I felt my lowest. Being conjoined with an individual or who I would regard as a siren, or one who appears to be of beauty and sound mind, but are dangerous to engage if handled improperly. An individual who proclaimed to water me in love, but turned out to be obtusely equivocal and misleading. Sour and passive, low in vibration, and energetically spaced. From here, Heartache in Remission has become not only the acknowledgement of feeling somber, but a prelude as to how one’s captive emotions help steer ships across seas to lands undiscovered that rumbers what is underneath to produce newness. I hope that the words your eyes read were satisfying to both your spirit and selves. Only in this moment of downtime may we re-create ourselves to produce a different day.
I let the bearings of my soul here, on this page be that of renewal and refuge to those who seek. — Micah Torey Parker
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Up and onward.