Thoughts On Sprouting

I. Death

eats my fruit before it bears:

the facts of Life, my friends

with benefits, yet sometimes

I think twice.

There is

a mystery.

A mis-story.

II. Oh the burdens we quietly shelve

for the continuation of Humanity.

Where is righteousness, where is recompense

for the generosity of a uterus?

The weights and the wounds

the risks and the wishes

the inflammation and the nausea

the insults and the ignorance.

The silent and vital

canopies of the world

crumble in our hands grasping for

coffee, ethanol, cattle.

The mighty fades to desert.

Fading, fading from memory.

But we cannot, all of us, breathe without the forest.

These things go hand in hand-

A river, a mother, a home on earth.

How we cut ourselves.

Self-mutilating children

speak all our truths

in subconscious body language.

III. Monthly, my blood brings fevers- howling

bones of tossed name

ghosts, aching to rattle

and rock this cradle.

IV. I am barely my own.

I am here, a chest of toys

for someone else’s constant

rearrangement.

Broken and buried- so many

pieces scattered.

The sum hums a song

that yearns to belong.

V. We fight to define ourselves as simply

undefined.

Wrong for wanting to possess myself.

Wrong for wanting, anything- too much.

And wrong for not wanting, too.

Hidden from myself while others

ferociously enjoy me.

Do I exist?

Treading the waves- the churning rhetoric

of pleasing to own but refusing to honor.

VI. Oh- Man! To Be!

as imperfectly free, I

would trade

entire years of my life to come

for 48 hours in your form.

VII. Mysinformed mysconceptions, force-fed

visual and auditory habitual angst

twist you (like a robot out of context) and I

into threadbare shrouds that

cover our faces, coat

our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tongues

our fingers and nails

with agent orange and mustard gas, thick

as a blanket of small pox.

Corneas gilded in the flimsy

dust

of drought and famine.

Such a painful fog we share- falling, groping, screaming,

crying&dying to see ourselves and each other, but this fog

is stubborn. How slow, how pervasive.

The farthest reaches, the tiniest corners.

VIII. My insomniactic uterus chants a verse

by Robert Frost

as it limps and gambols:

The woods are lovely,

Dark and Deep,

and there’s miles to go

before we sleep.