picture books
we want to tell our children everything -
everything!
we want them to know
how the world really works,
so they will never be deceived;
to know that this - all of this! -
will get better - because of you!
but we cannot tell them.
we take the first of infinite
inevitable breaths
to paint the world anew before them,
and they gaze at us with simplicity,
ready to trust first the first
and then the next thing
that we say,
ad infinitum.
so instead
we sell them pretty packaged messages
of the tiniest hopes for humanity,
like sharing
and being tidy
and wiping your mouth with a napkin,
and we pray they discover
what we finally know
before it is too late for them.
izziewilbury asked: Tell me about you?
I have the soul of a cat from another age. I listen to the way the sun plays through the trees. I curl my fingers through my lover’s hair and I think about how our energy will intertwine in the annals of time and space when we die. I like to imagine I spin words into tapestries, but I know sometimes the threads tangle and split and the meaning leaks out. I am tall enough to reach my dreams. I sleep best on my side with my lover’s arm around me to keep the shadows at bay.
what else would you like to know?
on Friday i wore a skirt, a pencil skirt
to be exact. i was proud of my legs,
burned solid & straight by the hours
of yoga & stretches. i bore short hair
& a brazen red jacket. i walked straight
uphill against the wind & the seething
stares of strange women.
i tried to see into their eyes. i pulled
my lips into a smile but they burrowed
back. every hair on my burnished legs
pricked by the breeze & lit by the sun,
I felt ashamed of playing at beauty.
you want to stop
turning deaths into statistics?
don’t make this tragedy
about Likes and retweets.
what makes us uncomfortable
about “humanizing” the men and women
seen as history’s villains
is that they are already human.
what was inside them
could slither in us.
To Truth
The more we try to nail down the concept of god, the further we stray from truth. God is a concept, an idea limited to the scope of imagination He, she, it, they—it’s all made up of a peculiar collection of human expectations. Every religion has its own behaviors and quote-unquote moralities to vilify. American Christians see the poor as people to be helped up, to be dragged out of their vulnerability and into a protective shell of self-help. In other cultures, the poor are sacred, or at least elevated to the same level as their well-off peers; their vulnerability is in a sense rewarded rather than maligned. To summarize the deadly power of religion: the more we say, “this is who you should be,” through dogma and social pressure, the less we are true to who—and what—we are.
vicissitude
we are living through the changing
of the guard, pantomiming until
the tycoons relinquish their thrones.
biding our time until our stories rise
unstructured, unhindered, we hear
the echoes of laughter FADE OUT.
we’ve ceased to pack our sweaty,
urge’d bodies into sticky seats
all in a row. we prefer the living room
for digesting our fiction and fantasies,
and even so the glowing box winds
down like a dying carousel in evening.
the way we tell our stories changes
in every generation, but the phoenix
plots burn alive in our chests and guts.
I like
well-tended scruff
peeking out of your cheeks
I like
the whorls in your hair
I like
that dimple
hiding on your earlobe
I like
your inquisitive eyes
and your nose-windows
I like
you.
within the city limits
they force our eyes
to meet in awkward
mingling nervous
tension. we recoil
from a smile, lash
out at a frown; no
expression satisfies.
we dream up
courages
for each other.
