A Poem for Paul by Ginna Funk Wallace

Published 2013-08-04

This is a poem I wrote for my dear friend Paul after he donated to my indiegogo campaign (indiegogo.com/projects/teaching-english-in-taiwan). It's a rough draft, but the transcript of the version read in the video is:

Hey, Paul.

Tell me what it's like to be a house.

To have a ten bedroom heart,

ten beds per room,

room for all, tell me what it's like

to be a hallway

lined with couches, hung

with art, a kitchen

with food for days, we're talking

good, local, farmer's market cheese and bread

beets like garnets and snapping peas,

tell me please, what it's like

to wear a wraparound porch smile

on your face every day.

While others wear masks you use joy

like the lightest of make-ups, just a little

brush here and there, rubbing off

on all your kisses, like whitewashing

your picket fence, your fence with no gate

so it can never, ever be closed.

Tell me what it's like to be water.

To be fluid and unabashedly changing,

to be change as a constant, to be constant

as an ocean, to be really

worth your salt, to exist in all places at once

in all your states, to be the color of truth,

not of sadness but still to be there

when we cry, to give birth

to everyone you love.

Tell me what it's like to be naked:

no costumes, no barriers,

no defenses, no lies, to be bare,

to be open, an unpainted house,

water in its vapor state, unadorned,

revealing and revealed, to exist

in your most pure form, to be free

to dance on a rooftop at sunset,

to be truthful,

truly, tell me

so I can learn to be that, too.