Untitled ("Sometimes I is good")

A brief reflection on youth and emotional inheritance, stripped down until forgetfulness itself starts to sound like survival.

A short, spare poem on forgetting and emotional absence: 'Sometimes I is good / To have forgotten / What you wanted to say', it argues that 'Choices never rhyme' and that wishing otherwise 'Has not to do with / hate and sacrifice / being the best / part of youth'. It turns toward inheritance - 'Father's without feeling / didn't express that / There is no hurt / No feeling really' - and ends on a wild child's refusal of 'any cross about wood and stone'.

The poem's center is numbness passed down: 'Father's without feeling / didn't express that' produces a child who reports 'There is no hurt / No feeling really', so emotional silence becomes the family's only legible expression. The grammar of the first line is its own argument - 'Sometimes I is good' fuses the speaking 'I' with the predicate 'good' and reads as both broken syntax and dialect, making forgetting a condition of the self rather than a passing event. 'Choices never rhyme' is the governing claim: in a poem so attentive to sound, the refusal of rhyme stands for a life that will not resolve into matched, redemptive pairs. The closing 'Wildness knows there shouldn't be / any cross about wood and stone' rejects the imposed symbol - the cross built of timber and rock - in favor of an unconverted wildness, echoing the cross-and-stone refusals elsewhere in the book. Source spellings and the title's 'I is' are preserved as written.