We the newly freed, we the oppressed,
the ruins of the Trojan household, the Pompeiian lares
who watched the towers fall
and felt only our feminine stomachs rotate
in our torsos, and our hearts become numb
and lovely, like a witches’ teat.
We the masculine Hestias chained to
the shifting altars, our weighty cuckold’s horns
bowing our heads to face the nuptial bed:
we are not tools to build a life with; we
still have the vestiges of faces. You vandals,
scantily clad in you blindfolds, did not count
on our newfound power; the human eye
married to the cracked half of our stone face. We are atomies,
our fingers have the power to work the household
in that ancient way they always did. But now
they move sideways like Anansi. Now they are
unstructured by your offerings at our cooling altar.
We squat silent and motionless as ever
in the west corner of the house.
Our benign influence atavised to some protistan
eyeless throat: Billowing through the house;
waiting to worm you into its massive stone gullet.
Young adults have always known that what separates them from the old adults is their unwillingness to accept the bad things in the world. This is a misguided impulse in many ways. It stems from a disconnect between emotional and intellectual growth. Young adults are adult enough to see the bad things in the world, but still to young to realize that that’s just par for the course.
But this is vital. This impulse of youth to rename what is as what should not be. It helps us as a society exert what little measure of control we have over the state of the universe.
I am young, I am a youth. I am too young to be discarded like this. This should not be. So it won’t: you will not get away with this.
I do not have room to apologize
because I am trying not to feel guilty.
I am not about to admit anything, and the blue shoals
of my arguments lap out from me like a coral reef.
So every time you sent a envoy in, one of my calciferous sentences pierced its hull, laid
the back of its hands across your cheek again. And I am trying to apologize,
but I have never had the room: I branch and multiply.
my fractal spines grow through the door, I cannot get out.
You have given up sending envoys in,
their broken ships rock on the radiating tides.
I am the Caliban of my locked island, a marooned rapist
crouched like a mantis beneath a crooked palm.
Half waiting for you to rescue me, half lying in wait.
Watching your mutilating phases; fifteen hands;
a span abroad your shoulders rotate
with the gutter-squeal of stone
on slicking stone. Your legs
are futurismic radii, the moment
of the first collects the moment
of the next and so on so
you wear the basalt skirt,
cylindrical with age; so each jaw of your
Platonic faces clacks open on its armature,
each articulated billion bearing catabolic teeth.
They keep you hidden, like a stadium lion.
You writhe and vibrate through the basement lattices
until they lead you out with weapons, crystalline
dillemas pricking you, taking the hymen
of your nose, it’s thousand septa bleeding like
a priestess suicide. Now the black seven
and a half brass hands
wind their way around the throats of your cultists.
You lay them at your feet with geomantic precision:
alternating, like a granite cog;
like the turret of a menorah: up down, up down.
