Unfinished

 The objection to the poet 

in a form

suggests a mind unborn,

embryonic, 

dystonic,

dysfunctional

and unfinished,

kneaded like a dough but half-baked before rising--

and that's unsurprising.

The general stance of the book bans

is a celebration of ignorance

and a quarantine from the contamination

of mental exercise and elaboration--

the fear of an excitation of 

sympathetic responses and 

personal expansion of the mind:

which I find poetry has the power to do.

The bubble parent wants a bubble child--

a sphere so clear yet fragile

to the wild

notion of the experience of

other skins

and other lives,

and wilts at difference instead of thrives.

They want not a world, but a womb,

to protect an unfinished mind

but they finish it with a tomb

because who can find

a future where avenues of struggle and strangeness 

aren't confronted? 

The journey of a hero shunted to the journey 

of a child, from playpen to playpen,

building up blocks as one does, 

and knocking them down again. 

I can barely imagine

the foul strangling harpy,

her talons clutched round her offspring's neck

who would so faintly damn an infant mind

to a brutal life-in-death

intellectual heck.

Bereft of the muses, perpetually unamused,

blinkered and blinded,

politically confused,

the target of propaganda,

calumny and grift,

alienated from humanity and

caught in a rift--

this Sheila Scylla, this Cracker Karen,

maybe it were better to 

be wholly barren, than to

wipe the landscape clean for the child you farrowed.

an innocent today--

perhaps a monster tomorrow. 

(From the objection to Amanda Gorman in a Florida school district by a whole ass fool. And the school district agreed?) 

Facing Her

 I hear you say all you can say

to deflect the incoming

barrage, and

the rifled barrel of your mouth

aims at a none-too-distant

target:

the broad acceptance that this reality

can be borne no more

and we can not stay hostages

to the rifle bore.

So, before you say another word

in defense of this disgrace:

tell me what you would say to 

the girl

without a face. 

Not some trick of rhetoric, the faceless, nameless child,

her features obscured because she never existed--

no, this wild

moment in the life of a man

who felt for a pulse and turned a head

and saw a bloody hole instead--

if you insisted

for once and all the necessity

of this obliterated 

face, as if to ruin the humanity

of her, to erase a whole life?

Then you would deface the world.

Because what sacrifice on your 

idol's altar ever is enough? 

What shed blood, 

or shredded bone? 

You have made a gilded idol

of Cain's brutal, fratricidal

stone. 

Those that the Gods Have Stricken

 You don't touch them,

not a hair on their heads,

though they rave

for the sake of the widow and the 

widow's son,

that your days be long and safe from the grave--

we knew that once, everyone.

There but for their grace go I--

and this once led the comfortable not

to deny the bread

to the hungry mouth or to be oblique:

Bind not the mouth of the kine

that trod the grain. 

We lost this wisdom and should seek it out--

and know one another again.

The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

The dust is thick on his sandals and in his hair

and you have denied him everywhere.

Enter the singer, his throat dry and

his body tired, although once he danced

with grace and ease.

He shouts that he hungers--give him bread.

Is he to be stoned, instead?

He thirsts, would you have him drink

bitter gall--or poison: think!

Do you treat him, Samaritan, for this dis-ease?

Or have you slain your brother in the midst

of his pain? 

And in your own way

carry the mark of Cain?