Barely

 Barely healing on a Saturday

from death by a thousand cuts

all week,

after I had kept going with

lashings of antiseptic

and tightly wrapped

in bandages like a mummy,

I have time now.

I unwrap to soak myself

and there's a terrible sound.

I let the wounds flow

and wash them clean.

Sunday I'm almost fit for company.

Monday comes and

I'm fit for work.

Broken in the Depths

 To break with

the rules and to use these

materials, 

despite all warning;

to reverse Noah, to

submerge and not to

float away from disaster,

but to view death as if

preserved in ice--

a specimen removed from the

current threat--

disrupted the pact between 

us and the deep. 

The intent to view death 

through a porthole,

fulfilled faster than eyeblink, 

as death rushed in, mercifully

faster than understanding could or 

last regrets.

We who lived with their

indeterminacy, 

the Schrodinger's sub, 

imagined horrors within horror 

worse than life itself.

The lungs of acid, brains of fire,

hallucinations of sirens,

Titanic ghosts,

kamis with mouths like lampreys,

shimmering things with seaweed

in their claws,

to depict an underworld with

laws not like ours.

We imagined last conversations

with one another and with a Maker

who understood and did not

forgive and doesn't,

silent as the water still and deep around them.

And yet the water came in

waves like blades in the pressurized depths,

crueler than any human cut-

cleaner overall. 

Tragedy holds no thrall for me,

I leave them here and for all time

the guests of the sea.

Neither deserving nor undeserving,

just unfortunate and fateful, 

unheeding of warnings,

the victims of the depths of curiosity

and the heights of hubris,

Icarus in his fall,

to something lower than the land

is all. 

My Identity is Not in Your Mouth

 Your definition is not for

my liberation

for every time I've been defined

it was to leave pieces 

of myself behind

and make boundaries where

I could not be.

No one has any right

to go around

defining me.

Define the shape of my lotus feet

and narrow me with whalebone.

Tell me I need to be escorted

with some kind of chaperone.

Deny me banking--

deny me cars.

Give me a separate entrance

into bars. 

Deny me jobs, bastardize my kids--

these are the results of the 

"defining" you did.

Choked with a halo,

burdened by wings--

women have been circumscribed

by the definition of our things. 

The size of our breasts,

the cut of our lips, 

the swell of our asses

and the width of our hips--we've been

callipered to excess for

our callipygyny by scientific tongs

and measured like 

an anatomy of wrongs.

Our literal clitori a mystery, our G-spot a

Shangri-la, our existence supposed to be

babies,

who knows whatever else for? 

Don't ask the definition of

what you would rather not even face--

Human.

Just fucking human. 

And don't get me started on race.

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?

When You have Fallen

 If I were to believe in heaven

(although I don't, not really)

it would be here,

in the notion we could redeem

one another eventually

even when we are too broken

sometimes to even

pick up ourselves.

There is someone who wants to lift up

even you. 

It might not even be a scam.