Owlets

I watched them on a webcam--
and wouldn't you?

Adorable nature,
struggling life
hatched, fluffy hairs
mostly naked and
weak,.

but so to speak--

how start we all?

and I wanted to see them
grow and fledge,
although I would miss them
when they went aloft

in four weeks-or five,
I knew the lifespan of owls,

and I thought these would survive.

But nature has her sway and say
what should be is not always that way.

And I saw them die--

And know more than I did before
of life and what it has in store.

Elegy for the Hangman

Should we eulogize the hangman
per the quality of his knots?
The kindness seldom spoken of--
and more or less, forgot?

When the doomed stood, blanched
fearful and subdued, wary of the drop
he gave confidence of the length of rope,
the length that made a lop

of the neck, cracking it at once
and granting peace of mind;
he accepted sometimes gold or silver
to do the deed he for kindness chimed.

Or would it be unseemly
to give the hatchetman his due?
Though we exchanged knots for strokes
past when his time was through?

Or could we acknowledge he
deserves sympathy for the sympathy he gave
though the clients that he served
were served unto the grave?

Elektron

Clear and slow as sliding dew
fall,
the trap found the
back foot of some six-legged life
as it came
from this broken branch
and seemed so ultimately
neither
clear nor slow,
not the bright beetle,
nor the amber flow.

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.

Swimming in their Blood

In the beginning was the first blow,
and the first blow begat vengeance,
and the next blow begat vengeance,
and vengeance begat vengeance,
like a family tree of misery.

The never-ending tit for tat
wrenched babes from tit and
tattered the world.
The vision of She Who Ever Fights
wades in the blood of the fallen
and her sword arm never fails.

And with each generation the lie
of who did what to whom and how
blood answering blood
will cancel the stain,
and ever do we see an
increasingly blood-stained history.

And microscopically I see
the everfighting bacilli
invisible to the naked eye
wading in the blood of those who
ever fight, infecting them
with bloody dreams.

For my steel, a needle
I might prefer, to subtly inject
an antidote to this bloody strain
that so poisonously infects,
inoculating with common good
against whatever this is
swimming in their blood.

Regarding Current Athletes

I wonder sometimes about
my body, and how I might have loved it better
had I accepted myself more.

Instead of wanting my
curves to disappear, what if I wanted them to do
things regardless of the looks?

If I accepted my bare self
and all the things I and that body could do
would I have done more?

My forty-ish body has
the beauty of gentle decline, soft
curved, genetically-blessed.

But it never was conqueror
on the field of play, nor exulted in triumph,
being pushed to an extreme.

At a pace where I set my standards high
and made myself the master of these
so many pounds of flesh?

Were my queer-bodied self more
authentically mine, might I have run it to a
more comfortable place?

And found myself more comfortable
in a less-stretched skin that I could live in?
Would I wear a different face?

I can not know, but only rejoice
in those whose bodies have become their voice.

The Ghosts of Fallen Women

My head is always beset
with the visions of fallen women
bloody in hotel rooms,
murdered at home,
lying in ditches,
traduced and betrayed,
in Magdalene Laundries,
on coroner's gurneys,
throwing themselves downstairs,
taking pennyroyal oil
and bleeding,
bleeding,
dying for days.

These living women
haunt my conscience,
these girls who shrieked
their labor songs in chains,
or were jailed for dropping
their gifts like stones,
who threaded the path between
their addictions
and the health of two,

who took beatings knowing they
did not
take those beatings alone.

My mind is haunted
with the knowledge of gifted women
happy in motherhood
blessed with strength
privileged in many ways--
and they remind me also
of these so many ways
the freedom to bear
means everything.

And that the freedom to choose
one's life, and
the freedom over one's body,
and the triumph
of the once-"fallen"
is the only redemption I give a damn about.
For the sake of the dead and gone,
for the sake of the here and now,
and for the sake of those
to be.

Only choices
let my
women be free.