Afraid New World

 There was no room for emergency

in the emergency room

so she settled into her car

as life emerged from her,

and then life left

her infant, too.

What were the doctors supposed to do?

If you said first, no harm

then no harm done,

but that math isn't fooling

anyone. It's attention diverted

from the harm of inaction

when fear has gained traction

and pro-life is merely

forced birth,

and such births will happen anyhow

and that the baby died doesn't matter

to the screamers now-

having happened in a car

not a clinic.

Call me a cynic, but if you call this 

an act of God, or

an act of fate,

I would say no--it was the state

that barred the door

that tied the hands

that choked the heart

that buried the child, 

all mummified in red tape. 

Tape as red as blood. 

Peril

 Underneath the cradle,

in the nursery

someone had placed a trapdoor--

whoever would have

put it there?

There, where the innocent

lay sleeping, over

the dark tunnel--twisting dark spaces

filled with deadly hardware?

It is both a terrible metaphor

and not.

I can't even tell you where the child 

is now. Fallen

like a leaf from

a storm-tossed

bough.

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?) 

What Breaks Me

 What breaks me is knowing

that under their roofs

there were 

carefully hidden

thoughtfully chosen

beautifully wrapped gifts

waiting for them,

to fill with delight 

those children's faces,

eyes shining,

missing baby teeth,

and they never came home 

to see them

and someone had to figure out

what to do

with gifts

like those.