In The Harsh Mirror of Where You Started


In the immaculate country
from which I come;
Do not blame me,
I was merely caught within
the circle of the ever-imposing
machine known as lovemaking.
My parents couldn't be cured of desire
and neither can I, nor any of us.
I was born a great disappointment
to myself, remembering as I traveled
through the birth canal, some past lives,
none of which I enjoyed, perhaps it was
the scent of cigar leaves on the doctors
hands as he caught me, bloody and just born,
blue faced and ugly, how within each circle
of time we are born and raised, crippled and old
before we've taken our first breath, totally isolated
by the boundaries of earth and will and man.
The world holds no thrills for me.
It offers no promises. I will not grow up to be
remembered. No smiling girl lives inside of me.
Where was I? Oh yes, in the immaculate country
from which I come, the sun rises in the East and sets
in the West. Visions fill the frame of every window.
Sorrow lives behind every door. I am sorry to be the one
to tell you this. I know it can not be easy to hear.
Take, for instance, an endless threat of rain
and no rain comes. Shadows piling up one on top
of another, lurking outside in the yard, but no man comes
to steal your heart. Certainly, life has its moments
of jubilation, tiny beads of happiness that are easily
swept away by the hand of bad luck. I suppose
if I could teach you anything about what I have learned
throughout my many lives and awarenesses is this,
even flowers grow impatient. Die before their time
is up. Bend and break and wither, feel buried under
the dark oblivion of snow. If only things hadn't been
so bright and clinical when I'd been born.
If only the doctor hadn't smelled of tobacco.
If only my father had been there to pick me up
when I fell sixty feet after being assaulted.
If only the world wasn't such a long desperate hallway,
imprisoning me within its walls, locking my tears in its
pull-away fist. If only the sound of thunder really was
the sound made by God moving His furniture and not
just thunder. If only the socket of my youth had blue eyes,
and not these green orbs of envy. What a racket life is.
What a sore blessing. What is justified as each night
consumes each day? What is remembered or forgotten?
What void is filled? I say, let life crowd around you like
a tafetta skirt and when you're through with it, let life
fall, pile around the ankles. Go out the way you came in,
naked in your penalized skin.