There is a tiny fiber of knowing that lives inside the vein of a leaf,
Where my story becomes your story.
Our story. For we are ‘They’.
She is muscled water.
Liquid that could swell into a fist,
Like a taut revolt; like roped honey,
A clawed raindrop, ouroboric,
Swallowing down her own tail.
He is standing down on the spine of lament.
Not a tsunami’s sturm, but a maker of waves.
With dog-eared shoulders, and skin off bruised shin,
He is not kicked, but doing the kicking.
In spiritual waterboarding, he drowns himself in doubt,
Fighting ever so violently against his ice.
Forever eddied and pineappled by his brutal lack of spine.
If someone loves you empty, how will they ever know you full?
I believe in my lies in order to lay with my beliefs.
Lullabying my belly with the sweet milk of distortion,
In blundering abdication, we have forgotten:
That I once promised you, and you me, a betterment for them.
A lung coming clean with grit, roiling tall from space and sand,
empty truer from dutiful harrow, and cleaner still from splice.
We each want what the wind carries north—
and resist what the lodge brings east.
When I sit down to write anthems of revolt,
I flip through the pages of you,
And your words climb under my fingernails
like scarab beetles burrowing into mummies,
everyone thinking they’re pharoah’ed when the hypnotist asks of past.
The stories, say the elders, are food for the people.
And we must ask if we can grow corn with the story we will tell.
We are no bigger than ants hunting for honey Sacoge.
Carrying loads bigger than small bodies can bear.
These stories are bigger than you and me, and yet still,
We find the harrow and the harm to lift them.
For in carnal whorl, all of us end ever slowly and ever only, underfoot.
I spread for him until it sews up the hemispheres between Us,
In the act of showing up and facing in.
Damelo, dijo Mujer Lobo, Loan me your pain,
And I will grow corn from the very concrete of your shaft.
A little one navigates the hairs on my arm like I am her own mystic continent,
A wide forest for her pilgrimage to cross. If you kill the longing, you kill the poet.
And we all walk our long roads through thick brush.
I to you, and you to me.
Ovulation is not ovation. It is perfunctory.
Don’t stay for what you hope it might be. Declare what it must.
No one is going to thank you for seeing their darkness.
You are the insect laying eggs under their skin.
