The Wound

 I had been on fire

and still smoke in places

a haze drifting around me

and that unmistakable scent.

Parts of me are ashes

and I don't care

where they went.

Not traumatized--

cauterized.

The bleeding stopped.

The past is a scar,

tough but fading.

We are 

not wrecks,

but what escaped them.

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?) 

The Limit Does Not Exist

 To those who would say 

this love is not 

(in your mind) 

a love divine,

what measurement did you use 

to fathom the heart--

either of God's,

or mine?

For I would go

on bended knee to the one I love,

but for you

I would not crawl.

And I would give my life

to the one I love

and care nothing for your words

at all.

If I would fight with angels,

what might I fear from the words

of men?

If I would lose the world for my love--

what of love could you say then? 

My love more visible in deeds

than in the salty tears of spite

of those who claim that love is not right

denying the basic needs

of those to love and be loved.

We are enough for that,

and survive the risks--

those that limit love must learn-

the limit does not exist.

Eating Dust and Bone

Eating dust and bone
with  bled-out mouths
through tears too dry
to leave traces,
they were staring out
at a land called hope
with no hope left
on their faces.
When the danger fled,
danger still hung on,
the form of a brother
changed to a
treacherous friend--
the story so old
they could tell it to
themselves,
with an ending
that tastes of dust
and bone.

Ten long years back
they were brave and awake
that the danger faced
could be made erased.
But that treacherous friend
simply lay in wait
letting the danger come back
by looking away.
They were promised guns
and the fat of the land
and got decades of war
and the back of the hand,
Could one be sore?
No, it was written in stone
if only they ever read
they would see,
that promises made were ever
dust and bone
and all they ever could be.

But the promises made
that lead to lives far worse
should be understood as
evil as a magician's curse
and the echoes back
from where they began
should cause sleepless nights
for the certainly damned--
as they sit at great tables
in their stately homes
may they taste nothing
but dust and bone.

Like the Dust

The motes glow in
the still humid air
alit with sunlight
like planets falling
in a trajectory to the bed
so near the window
with the sun streaming in,
that I sit here and watch
glowing bodies of light--
only dust,
and they seem as radiant as angels.

And I know I am made of
the things made in stars.
And only one star
serves the planet I live on.

But I see even the stars in the least bit
of dust.

I am Dust! Star Dust!
And the stars spun out of the
beginning with a Bang--and I
am dust and banging along.

And maybe I project a little light?

Shouldn't I?