MICROCOSM

We are incipient duality,

a form he rumored blindly; princes do not warn

their peoples of their lack of power.

She wore incestuous wreaths of hair, and wove her lust

into a keepsake, wrenching from that infamy a shape of tombs,

although overt murder was a crime she did not know,

and mercy was the nature of her love.

Break the soul, perform the miracle,

as grim gums mouth asperity and hands climb stairs

grabbing for the dog bond, bone,

grabbing for the lord's tail in the threatening air,

so I was born,

was catapulted into air which knew no balm as yet

but must be breathed alone and shrieking into sober harshness,

swaddled into clothes and bare

of mother world. I wept my lonely tears, reiteration of the hours when

growth fought fear, and all her broken faith

within our spatial hemisphere.

I grew the fruit flesh of all young children,

smelling of oranges and delight; juicy as the taste of apples.

Mountains rose on my perception day by day

and the valley laden breast with fruit and cockles hung:

the orchards of my landscape were fertilized

with sea shells.

But now we live in nun towns,

morticed on tombs.

We are the stripes of black and white,

the shining fences of our fear,

or leaving good and evil gormless, self constructed pickets

casting iron rage in which to pray,

or lavishing flowers on a statue.

There are still the pits, the traps are filled with tiger's milk,

the communion wine in which she drowned her young,

(blanketed in blue mantles, composed for prayer).

We are the heirs of superstition, breathing air of past attrition,

mouthing crypts

divined from an ovarian apocalypse, our final word.

We make no comment, but apostrophe:

we are the scarlet, polyglot breath, the postulant of reason:

a concentration of eccentric, a lament of need: there is no time

in which to wait coherently, by choice.

We are a split, a sound of hollow steps, we do not resound

in papier mache plazas built for children, as a toy,

we do not enjoy the eagle world. We do not like the sound,

utilitarian conversation.

Liberation is beyond the antic poppycock,

a mystic circle, or a stepping on a crack,

and frail flesh merely does not house the halls

where blood runs, yelling eagerly;

it waits, and watches slanting, rooftop eyelids,

where the glances fall

upon the ground, struck like lightning through a rod,

or singing hymns in church.

I am full knowledge of acrostic hours,

and divine as gypsies are,

a fraud, with cherries hanging on the ear.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen