Dorothea Lasky

photo by Matt Walker

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Fake diamonds

I like fake diamonds
Little sparkly assets
Better than a real diamond would be on your finger or anywhere else
Sometimes I think about fake diamonds running thru everything
Like people's blood with not-real diamonds inside
And beds made with fake diamonds within pillows
Would you dream a glittering icy sun
Under such a thing
Teacher, I think of you, too
When I think of things that are beautiful, but are also lost
And what that could mean to have started off so
So that every word you say expresses your forlorn countenance
So that your every shirt bears a sad name
O Teacher Teacher when you put on your sad shirts
Do you cover up a chest and arm of fake diamonds
Does your skin glitter, all the potentiality
Of someone who is so wrong but who didn't have to be
Who is so sad at gravitas
Too lost you will never know it
Who was born a sad man but will die an angry one
Little child, I was born sad, too
Perhaps we can love each other one day
As people who know the universe is not a joke
It's not a joke you know, it’s dead serious
As serious as the dark
It always is
The dark I mean
O Teacher you must know this too
Teacher of nothingness
Teacher of idea with no bread
Teacher of breast and bone
But only lilt in-between vertebrae
Oh, what it is
Why am I surprised
Deep and dark an ocean
The chasm between love and the imaginer

Dorothea Lasky is the author of Black Life and AWE, both out from Wave Books. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). She currently lives in New York City.