1.
dear feminism,
do i think of women
when i write to you?
why do i personify?
angry at an unjust world,
angry at injustice in ourselves,
have i been taught to fear you?
ignore inequity of fears?
or hide
in the shadows of your salty curves
speaking soft with sycophantic tilt?
was this what mother meant,
portending talk of therapy
two decades in advance?
a bouy on three waves,
i crash against protuberances too:
limp didactics on avoidance for the victims,
waking in continuums of shrugging crime.
sameness differs in utopias --
every latent gut avers the right to spill.
despite the lissome quell forgetfulness contains,
my proper sphere will leave me
deafened in a wrack-dry
tidal echo--
'Fairness' stains clear beauty dark
as my imagined egos drown at last
from down our oceanic well of shame.
sacrifices fade,
i cannot write...
i write, and fail,
defined by sediment cliche,
reading women authors out of obligation ..odd desire,
and so in dim medieval-fashion
miss
the trail of monoliths erected
for a craven ease
2.
dear civil rights,
why were you taught
through prisms of boredom?
my voiceless reading left you to your rage,
while i communed with glossy nature,
private leaves.
how dare i clap your back
"congratulations"
at your tidy givens granted
scars were open past my seeing,
and bleed still
while right here, empathy dies, now
dreams are bombed,
grafted to infected faculties
to wallow tended in a garden of injustice
erudite and dead,
i **** a bit i tell myself then stuff my face with food,
cover breath with smoke
and sleep in sour ignorance
no courage left to care.
blind grins bouquet the status quo
of rotted stems, discarded roots
i bury you with homeland fear
the killing silence filled with just intentions
for tomorrow
3.
dear feminism,
you speak for me, too--
my genderless ear attunes
cathartic sweep of ills
scaled beyond your other selves,
sexing into common chosen songs
no fearful tremble
at a mainstream backdrop reprimand--
to be a good gender,
--this gender not that gender--
gestate bigotry of symbol wombs,
cut ripe to cater to unquestioned whim;
no violent selfhood requisitioning
to closet inner innocence in pain
contractions shock in further waves
i midwife simple hope i hope
true fairness you have nursed in seeing death
4.
dear punk **** feminism,
marginal i ask as i perform
unstructured sutras on my heart
exemplar of a meta-freedom
burning in the core of threaded ages strung--
how then life without your voice,
vast silence unobserved,
the hidden anti-*** persisting
in our gender-theory--theorizing sterile norms--
sweet pulsing concupiscence
in our every waking breath
a pollinating zephyr tease toward
celebrating every feotal bathtub bliss --
unbridled ideologies unleashed
unmade into opining din
5.
dear temperance,
i vote you cherished
whirlwind
singing endless through the ageist ridicule
apparent failure in the civil warrior's eye
dogma blinks
denial of the rights you suffered for
but underneath compassion all along
i rally in your family's younger gaze
staring down,
questioning the steady rhythm of a whiskied fist
6.
dear feminism,
have i been taught to celebrate you?
have i been taught to fear for you?
have i been taught to treat you as a woman?
why do i personify you?
like some Sophia cybered up atop the forums of our age
blind and failing
i would be dust as well
like any rightful fading into dust
be swept along with all coercive screenings,
fear-born silences
immune to reason and the reasons of the heart--
rather than to live forgetting
letting go the questions giving rise to equals in a discourse
revising what it means to ask the meaning of
#
dear feminism,
when you are gone..
i for one will sing you
hope
to protest bigotry
a raging tranquil step
of care-filled voicing
dare an upward sloping arc
a dream becoming shared
to overcome
attain
inspired by once unfamiliar names
i will still be here,
the angry feminist
burning in my flagging underwear
brightest outrage at injustice
your deeper loves, fairness
selfhood honored
as if written in the stars
or ancient shorelines
-- you will not be gone
"She says, he wrote it--he says, she wrote it." -Lucretia Mott, speaking to the collaborative efforts of J S Mill and Harriet Taylor