Changes

How do I know

what I cannot change

until I try?

How do I know

what I cannot change

until I try?

How do I know

what I cannot change

until I try? 

I want truth,

not serenity.

I want growth,

not security.

I want challenge,

not stagnancy. 

How do I know

what I cannot change

until I try? 

I want purpose,

not comfort.

I want more,

not less.

I can no longer accept

or expect less for or from myself.

How do I know

what I cannot change

until I try? 

I will not take "no" until I

think about "how" or "why."

There will be changes and

they will be mine.

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.

She Descends

 Where love was gone

the dry world sighed for what was lost

and the maiden left her couch to see:

Nothing bloomed in the garden

and no tree bore fruit. 

The air had no birdsong and

rain would not fall.

She would find love and return.

What she can't take with her 

will drop onto the path:

the cloak of invulnerability,

her shining armor,

her girdle of confidence,

her many jewels,

her sword of discerning,

the words of power--

gone.

The skin unwound from her flesh,

the fat rendered in the heat,

the nerves exposed and made

into a garland for a holy tree.

Her bones walked into

the land of the dead

to find her love.

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. 

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.

Hold Your Thoughts

Say no new prayers over me
while my brain pan cools
and that last synapse discovers
no relay and
my self slips into
nothing;
and hold your thoughts
like you might hold a call
while important business
was engaged in
and you were discovering
not mere words to say--but the right ones.

Stop time by ceasing motion:
no sudden tip of the hand of fate
be here, or now, but let
this blood spilled remind you
of where blood is supposed to be,
and let you know
once again, why it is wrong
to see it on the outside.

Don't cover my bled-out wounds
with bandages of words,
as if, mummified by rhetoric,
your thoughts and prayers
might raise the dead, and even better,
forestall your rush to defend
the bloodless weapon
that did my blood-soaked body in.

Give a little care for
the remnant of this
still-remembered ghost.
I was not your politics
and my still self should not
play its host. I was and then
not. But do not portray
me as victim to ideas--but know a person
unmade me.

And also unmade their self.