Back to Zero City Poetry Page.
Returning from high, dark places
I collide with myself
Awake in your arms, startled
Indulging in your too-familiar flesh
As if new skin had flowered
In my heart's absence
But how long before my mind
Begins to wander. To want
What I don't have
Simply for the having
Something new. How long
Before I want your tongue
To slip between my lips
Like his did. To want
Your hands to fan my quick desire
Like his hands. To want
To feel my muscles
Clamp around his shaft
Like a gibbon wraps
Its hand around a branch
And from that hold
To swing across empty thought
And out of myself completely
How long before the animal
Awakes and shreds the gentle
Stillness slung between us?
But, for the moment, truly
It is good to be home.
Born on the battlefield you made of the maternity room
In swift gushes of blood and violence
After you slugged a nurse then blamed it on experimental drugs
Which sedated only on the surface
But left your soul awake, that black-eyed raging beast
Blasphemed when it would see the Catholic priest
Called in against your wishes
Atavistic appendix of your Irish maiden name
Even then, even as a girl, you were already betrayed
By your body, by your brethren,
Seventeen and married
Seventeen and mother
Seventeen and murdered
By a whole long future rolling on in smothering sameness,
Your only purpose in it to be pleasant and content,
To be beautiful and malleable and insignificant
But all women are fugitives, gambling on compromise with hooded eyes
Even then you had begun the first campaign
In your own guerrilla war, not to regain what you had lost
But to destroy what they would make out of your losing it
Born on the battlefield, you began to build your army
Carved from your own white flesh
Your fierce brood of fighting children
Viking hearts lashed to suburban dreams
With nothing at all in common but their anger
And their arrogance, they burned so brightly
In explosive youth it's a wonder any lived
Beyond their teens. Taught early to be subtle
To see everything but never show it.
Never cut their eyes or show their hand
Never falter, never fail, no matter how long in the stalking
To run wild and wreck havoc behind
Benign, beautiful eyes, anonymous as elves.
Grounded only once in all those years
And even then, not for building tiny bombs
In the backyard, but for the getting caught.
When you at last affected your escape
The general off to fresh campaigns
You cut the dog soldiers loose, purposeless
Cashiered, decommissioned, but not deprogrammed.
Equipped to withstand any atrocity
But with no skills to live at peace
They are walking now, tick-tocking through the wider world
With their benign, beautiful eyes, revealing nothing
Seeing everything, waiting for the flint which strikes a spark
Exposed at last on the evening news
By some shocked and anxious neighbor
whose short-lived fame surrounds the phrase
"He seemed like a regular guy"
Back to Zero City Poetry Page.