Who Can Govern Themselves Out of Governance?

if I could be somewhere
I wasn’t I would be there

or I would have already
paid that place some

cold and charitable visit.
if you knew how wealthy

I wasn’t you would run.
I cannot remember

what I was before I tried
to become what I thought

I could in light of the
dark that swallowed me.

the story of how I thought
I had not been pure and

had not been enough. how
I was not there though I

had been but was gone
after what I did not

know I did not need
came. how do you fix

that which the house
has no tools to fix?

where is the resolve as
bright as the wet face

of a child, the sight of the
rigid origin of the break?

Copyright © 2023 by A. H. Jerriod Avant. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 13, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Home, mobility, and the revision of life are the tracks my thinking traveled down when I went and thought of making this poem. That whole ‘being in two places at one time’ thing . . . that ‘gettin’ out of one’s own way’ thing . . . self-perception and that of others once we make it out into the larger world . . . that ‘puttin’ on face for work’ thing . . . The way these internal motivations manifest externally, revolving and circling our lives in the same way a pack of vultures makes laps in the air above fresh roadkill.”
—A. H. Jerriod Avant