Mastodon daylight lowers itself
Swinging into tower walls,
Slaughtering tangled sunbeams below clouds
Lifting monarchs above raindrop debris.
This is our first day, our last day.
This is cold cynicism.
This is not a desperate love poem to our tribe’s sheik.
This is the ringing in of natives speaking
Ashanti: peace, peace, peace.
We take our lives and
Pierce them into the center of open whirlpools;
Take our brutishness, nasty and short,
And stick it to the glittering mendicants of Times Square.
This place we call home, pulses
With the quickening of a heartbeat upon grace’s touch,
Hastening the traffic we call hell. It is morning -
Bruising our temples with memories of last night’s dreams that
Perpetually call us the heroines, the failures, the beasts.
It’s bloody. Because in truth we are princesses by name, yet
Privileged to know bitter seas, thicker in courage than straw.
Employment is a dirty phrase, like “proprietary information.”
Wrench the roots of hope out of our beauty,
Sculpt a new worship into our minds.
Like Midas and his touch, make us powerful to change crime.
Simply because it’s immoral doesn’t make it irredeemable.
Alarm the larks of America — because this is no longer ignorance.
It is time to wake up and time to siege our fortresses of false makeup,
False pretenses. Let our creator of mountain forests
Set up before us
Good news.
