Built

 I am all

boundaries like a property map

and scaffolding of 

scar tissue

and nets of 

projected nerve--

an edifice, a public monument,

an institution of self.

My foundation is dug

deeper than I want to know,

fathoms in the earth,

My spire to be

is beyond the bounds of

atmosphere.

Yet here am I

a work in progress

sorting out the many ways

that I 

am built.

The Problems I Have

 The trouble with me,

the problems I have,

are made of flesh and bone and bad

ideas, and

exist wherever

bad ideas and flesh and bone are sold. 

Because I know right now

that flesh is tragic

and needs proliferate, 

and my sadness is for 

as much a thirsty human carapace

as for the genius 

child within.

But imagine a hundred cults without vision or 

a thousand militias without

a cause,

but some dumbass speaking could make them

so,

so,

so much a thing in motion. 

And I welcome my unexternalized 

sorrow 

for it has not

yet made of me a fascist. 

My problems are small against a fucked up world

is all. 

I resist hating others for my mortal condition.

And if I stress this point, 

could it be enough?

Impatient on a Monument

Tell me what you

elevate

commemorate

memorialize

and I will show you

your examples

your values

your character

for these monuments

are not mere

milestones

idly marking a path

with just

a number along the way:

a concrete literal fact--

but the time it took to

render the hairs on

a horse's ass

as lovingly as

you tend to your own face.

Marking Quarantime

In the absence of the flow
of time as we knew it
we were restored to the
rhythm of daily bread,
and the need to wait
for the organic rising
of water and flour and yeast
and the nourishment
that comes from the
marriage of work and time.

In the absence of certainty
we cast the bones to
divine our fate and drank
wine to fortify the nerve
to take another day and
the next, and another,
watching those gamble
with life and death,
and drinking in the waste.

In the certainty of need
we gave to one another
the gifts of bread and love
and felt the pain of
absence and understood
anew the shattering loss
of a world that was
the loss of life, through
whatever disease
struck off our
beloveds.

And so we learned:
Life was short and
necessary, and suddenly,
we had all the time in the world,
and in the midst of dying,
there must be a rising--
of blood and sweat and tears
and the nourishment
that comes from the
marriage of work and time.

We must mark not days,
but history, for we
are perishing from our start.
It is not from nothing we come,
and to nothing we go,
but from and to everything,
and that thought
should also be
our daily bread.

Faith (adendum)

The pages of a
sacred book
should be no shroud
for humanity,
but should be
the rainbow cloak
that protects us
while we
seek many truths
under the sun
and face many fears
in the dark
of night.

Chrysalis

Your former self
seems to me
like the chrysalis of the you
before me now
the shed and left-behind,
the name
the photos, of the you
I've come since to know,
more than those relics could represent,
a husk yet brimming
with the possibility
of you
waiting for you to burst
forth in your humor
and light
in your possible self
in your indomitable
person,
in your correct and
recognized NOW,
still a fragment of the loveable you
but nothing I would hold on to
if it casts a shadow on
your current radiance.
for I have loved you both ways now,
and I have seen the difference,
and if I know the difference to me?
The difference to we?
What more is there to see
in you? I await
with every love
in me as bait
to love more the self
you have in you,
and learn to love with more
the self I have in me.

Rainbow

She was not appropriated,
but had left when, tired of the fights
over who deserved love, and who
deserved rights,
her surest hope was to just
take flight.

But I recall that one day
when her nose piercing meant
she could not stay
under your roof,
and those times you said
she should pray
those magnificent colors of hers
away.

So she went to Pride
with us
and was baptized by
mustachioed nuns
and cried with us
when we remembered
sad times and walked
among
imposing healing angels
and tried--

to find words to explain
what to her was second nature--
where hope was needed,
why! There her banner flew! And her
arc leaned towards justice
for all of us--

but her last thought
on leaving was of you--
did you not need hope and promise, too?
Because what she knew of love
and empathy
she learned
(better than you knew)
from things she'd read

where rainbow windows
and glorious choirs
were where beauty touched
hearts--like yours,
and ours.

But there comes a time
when for safety's sake,
and sanity, she made a break,
and wrote to you
of her wife, years on,
and her children, too--

all to be disregarded by you.

Your rainbow stolen?
Your hope bereft?

No, no. Not so.

She left.