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

Fall equinox--
at the ocean's shore
waves leap at stars

my feet are tired
but they will never feel as heavy
as the ones that took these stairs to bed
every night
having labored
until the smothering sun had seeped into their very beings
the floorboards have grown wise
among the unceasing symphony of footsteps
each layer of rust and grime
conceals an unspoken history
but this hotel was one of few
that took note and listened
with every step I do my best
to glide into the past
echoes of daily conversation
questions and longing
"Did you hear about..."
"The most hilarious thing happened to me today..."
"I miss the way she..."
I see the walls transforming around me
the paper lanterns hanging
dazzling gold detail restored
brilliant red puffed with warm radiance
I see the light spreading across the ceiling
like hundreds of arms held out
to comfort the souls making a home
in this foreign unaccepting land
the wafting smell of familiar cooking
brings about throngs of memory
i will never really know the feeling
but as I look out the window
through the lazy haze of apricot sunlight
I can taste the uncertainty and fear
but it is overwhelmed by dreams

there is something wistful
about the way the cars move along
and the way I am watching them
with such diligence
from my aloof window
even up here in my leather seat
i feel a connection to their humanity
the urgency in which they scamper
through the streets and the
sunlight
so comforting in its afternoon glow
that it makes me melancholy
because as it has reached its peak
and will soon be gone.

isn't it funny the way we assume?
that this honey veil will be draped once again?
anticipating the glint of another windshield
as if it is written down in Time's script?

there is something sad
about the way we presume connection
with one another and with nature
the way we reflect ourselves
our existence
onto the tiny people laughing in the parking lot
and the trees that speak no tongue at all
only the language of perpetual existence
that we try desperately to decipher
with our limiting words

I haven't written anything in over a year.

My chest has risen and fallen with the track of the sun, like a neanderthal burial covered in flowers.

I have wept for myself, I have wept for my friends, I have wept for my grandfather now in my lungs and in the soil,

but still I haven't written anything in over a year.

I went to the zoo one last time with my confidant, rode up the long elevator so steep I would fall off with a sneeze.

I have felt the last rays of sun before winter, I have felt ice on my eyelashes, I have felt the length of winter, stretching out into eternity, stretching out way beyond what I can touch,

but still I could not bring myself to carry a pen.

I have heard a phone call I've dreaded my whole life, the stony silence of a room full of bad news when the ice cream clutched in my bird bone hands hit the ground.

I have met the ground and the hard concrete, I have met death sitting on top of a cherry tree, I have met a woman calling herself my Nana but half of her is dead,

And I guess I wasn't brave enough to grab a pen.

And I wasn't brave enough to see my grandfather in the casket.

I never saw the wreath of flowers, I never saw his wedding photo propped up in the corner of his little bed, I never saw his chest move and move no more, with the track of the sun, like a neanderthal burial, covered in flowers

but I did see the room full of people when I gave a eulogy
and I heard the lie I told that this wasn't an unfinished story, and I feel death and grim upon me like ancient flower pollen fossilized in awful crystals on my bones.

And maybe that is why I have been too scared
to write
for over a year.

God has eaten my luscious mango
showing up in the disguise of a squirrel,
no  expression of remorse either,
just vanished without a trace,
did not return ever after.
                                       God, please do not bother,
                                        usually you are a do-gooder
                                        I too am, let's have a pact,
                                       for a while I'd have the moon, instead.

it is in dove's ways how i love you

and it is no common sight
to take glory out of what this
life ever so defiles with its
uncouth hands.

in the way that i soar with my
unnameable wings over your
territories finding shade,
clinging with the wind, my mothered world in the eclipse of a day's turning - where together with the fleshly rivulets i am unafraid
to trample the night with lithe sound: a wing's flutter echoes
through the caves of your mouth deepening in primeval silence. stones woven earthly, intricate as a bed of mendaciloquence where truth lies stripped to the bone of the very voice of it. oh and what solace waits for me yonder hills that recognize my stretch - even the shadows rejoice in their fill of my passing elegies yet, no love
shall die! night arrives drowsily over these planes that seek me, and i cascade as gentle as a pond girdling your ample fish that i viscerally own, thriving inside me, whirling in graceful fire.

the morning takes me with you,
its duty speaks where i was once
sterile without path - you take mine flight and hover past everything, spreading garlands that would name all of them, ours!

This house, it does not speak of me
I am unknown to these adobe walls
these cool clay floors
I press my feet against
wanderlust, I dance
through desert nights I roam
these sands to drink the moon
and follow stars toward home.
I travel endless nights
painted blue with black
wait for sunlight
once again to warm my room.
Nights I dream to be
in wild fields
with you.

Tonight
a million flowers loom
clouds of gypsophila bloom
at my window and beyond
the jasmine vines, they crawl
saturate and scent my paper walls
these night lilies, only a dalliance
that blooms and fades
your hands soft upon my legs
we are drunk from dulcet wine
sung from the moon that dips
caress of your reddened lips
as we travel this world
lilting softly slow.