“If you don’t believe in something, you’ll fall for anything.”
—Falsely attributed to Alexander Hamilton
Felicia Culpa, if you don’t believe in something, you will fall
off a ladder in a purple-curtained Bourbon Street shop where
you were stocking bamboo shelves with magic
doodahs, and a voodoo doll for “Change” will
fall with you, and its head will break off, and you’ll breathe
in all the change vapors and sawdust and you’ll find yourself
floating in space and orbiting yourself.
Then, wild girl, if you believe only in yourself you will fall,
into your own atmosphere, and you’ll breathe
your own fire in, and you’ll dive down to depths where
rock flows free, and, believe me, you’ll wonder how there will
ever be solidity without some kind of miracle or magic.
So, dear one, you’ll want to believe, because if there is magic,
presto change-o, you can still make solid ground for yourself,
sweet Felicia, you can grab a wand and work your will.
But if you don’t believe the warnings you will fall
pregnant and your Victorian aunt will tell you where
the wayward go, and the air you breathe
will stiffen to suffocate, and you can’t breathe
pure incense, that’s not the kind of magic
that’s going to get you to a place where
you can set up the Jenga pieces of yourself.
If you believe the moralizers you’ll fall
like a tower that went up too far too fast, and you will
end up a Babel-tongued mess, writing your will
in Comic Sans hieroglyphics on the memories you breathe.
If you believe everything you’re told, you’ll fall
into wyvern caves inside rabbit holes lined with magic
fur, get snared in the warp of rhyme and weft of stories, and you will
get lost at last in the ant farm of words, and end up nowhere.
But you might have to go nowhere before you can get anywhere;
things get strange when you’re making a change, and I know you will
make yourself try again to assemble the kit of yourself
and you’ll build yourself a pair of lungs to breathe
with and you’ll pick some plausible, livable kind of magic,
knowing that even if you believe in something, you’ll fall.
So fall (“o felix culpa!”) where all the laughing children fall, and breathe,
from that pile of leaves, the air which will crackle with dying, living magic—
just let yourself believe, disbelieve, believe, disbelieve—and fall.