I Never Want To Go When It’s Time by Kate Light

I can’t shake you off, no matter how hard I try. Listening to Nina Simone. Smoking and reading this poem.

I Never Want To Go When It’s Time
Kate Light

I never want to go when it’s time
to go; I want to hang back, to read
a book, or make another line rhyme.
I always think that what I really need
is there in the place that I am leaving,
not waiting in the new place I ached
to go to. I go, but with a kind of grieving,
saying, Why’d I ever wish to shake
things up, when things were really fine?
To be with him I always had to yank
my roots, I always had to pull my bones
by heartstrings, to tear my spine
from land to land; sometimes I walked a plank
to reach that world, and breathe, and write these poems.

—

From Open Slowly by Kate Light, published by Zoo Press, 2003.

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