Acrophobia
Dread is a yellow hand, yellow the color of nicotine’s mucous
clenched about the lungs pressed against the bones.
This fist says: forget everything else.
Remember I am each name of derision you were ever called.
Also, I am the spittle your enemies gobbed.
How can they still be at it, lasting long into the years
of even a nursing home’s prison?
Well, as long as you’re at it, stuck out here like a scarecrow
on panic’s pole, perhaps your craw will recall its caw.
Certainly this ribcage could also be the hull
of a grand exotic ship & that boat a bridge
across highways & high seas.
Now feel the cables, stanchion-thick, holding rivets.
Perhaps, after all, those are the rods, the rails
of some great fire escape balcony right in smog’s tower.
Believe in the elation, ladder rung by rung,
for the traversal curves here into the night air’s
shimmering clarity.
Its layers bounce & buff, stars murmuring to clouds
above these twinkling quilt-counties. At the top,
beacon ice-blue back to red’s warning, the light holds
what below has been plight enough.
Feel. The sky is flying through you & you, it.
This is the trust thrust forth out of fear to the other side.
Not Potter’s Field
Not this time, not in this life.
Not the waxen palsy of trembling fingers
with dirt-grimed nails & shelter, potato-skin thin,
scraped to white peelings mouths taste the floors of.
Not a shaved mushroom’s stub poking its button eye
through the fetid dark bone-cold as slime
while disease leaches energy until even the arms
become puppets & one is rigged, chin-to-shoulder,
with only a shrug between need, terror & the call light.
No, not poverty’s helplessness with something savage
about the scavenging to salvage one’s self
from such guilt-running mire, such shameful indignities.
No, blameless & named for once by the love of another,
happiness shall rise as a plain chant
in cloister’s stained panes, a chapel’s warm tapestries,
every warm wall singing of that luxurious kindness,
that faith in the humane.
No Audience Please
(“I never feel things until later.” Catherine Ryan Hyde)
After the fact will be an allowance for feelings
in moments less guarded by appearances kept up.
Solitude’s a balm. Solitude’s a torment,
but either way, fragments re-collect magnetized by poles
of being a being self-possessed.
During the occurrence deflect reactions sought –
an anger spite might delight in or tears
Cruelty salivates to lick.
Never sweat it in the presence of those who get off on the scent of fear mixed with pain.
Blankness foils efforts to disrupt, to disturb.
See this mask mirror back the thwarted impact as with a spider’s spinneret inside
the spirit-nerves make their escape.
Later, if necessary, go mad as mad can be in a safe space of trust
as patient to witness every emotional storm at its worst.
Then open the windows.
Air all the rooms out.
Inhale, exhale as energy so private no fools need be suffered in the light of it.
Shout it Out
Rally round energy despite instability
along the fringes, the veins distended
like fleshy water buckets…
In order to feel better perhaps all this pain
is needed as a language of the body listening in
for the experience of song.
No, we are not all shaped by the exact same strife,
are not egalitarians except for the fact that difference
is our root, the rage of lives, a collective conscience.
There fear is an underground river responsible
for hatred or hope.
Perhaps that is why I need screaming, a Victorian
within oppressed by a breastplate of steel.
Fact: you are going to get hurt.
Fact: any Cancer alters what may not be mentioned.
You must speak it or proceed quietly
while the skin itself attests.
Still, a frontier, elsewhere there is marching.
To fight for your own rights is to fight for the enemy’s.
Anatomy, human, but underneath, a soul.
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