Jeremiad

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In the beginning, I was born out of a
flame forged by the twin candles of body
and desire.
I grew up in a garden where one tree
gave me what I’d always had and the
other, what I’d never known.
Though childhood was bright and full of
light, I lived in shadows, and I am
moving now through times I dare not
touch for fear of wounding parts of me
where blood won’t congeal, where scars
will not heal.
If my fingers claw the earth and the skies
sing, it is because such things occur in
dreams when the powers will it.
I see men, savage in their splendor,
with feathers and bones, totem-headed
serpents guarding hearth and home,
hearts strung with trip-wires, booby
trapped and IEDed with last night’s sin
and this night’s need.
I see lips, guarding the hole in each face,
with smiles like red ribbons pulled tight
across thin white wrapping paper
surrounding a chute that leads to
heartache, mouths that speak words
of grace spread thick as a slab of yellow
butter painting the brown bread of a
freshly-baked day.
O, how those words might feed like
kisses piled up as offerings on your
face and on your knees, on hands
that reach, arms that embrace and
tongues that taste of seas, of a flood
that comes where there are no trees
and land is canopied with cloudless
skies that know only deep blue or black.
Ranging through a city of smoke,
trudging up and down streets of ash,
across broad horizontal planes pierced
with avenues and squares, fountains
choked with roses or running with blood,
I want to cry out my rage, but instead
of being a voice that speaks from a
burning building, I want to be the
building itself.
I want to be the flames scorching the
edge of words, choking the meaning
into sullen wisps of smoke that push
skyward into an endless American night,
telling those who gather to watch the
flames that there aren’t enough faces
to come home to, not enough beds
to share, lips to kiss or holes that can
be filled in with the bits of self they
care to part with.
And when I stop it will be for paper and
pen, for poetry written on the naked
flesh of women and men, on chests and
thighs, in crevices, along jagged cracks
and red fissures where history hides
away, while politics broods on sheets
stained with the blood of sons they
cannot name, those lost on a stretch
of sand-wrapped peninsula, where the
face of every woman is housed in the
tent she wears and each carries a child,
dangling from a shriveled breast like
a dead bird hanging in the market
window, while those with their mouths
stuffed full of TV ads for fast food,
designer drugs, and weight loss schemes
roll the dice across bellies swollen with
hunger, disease, and death.