Slam Poem To Learn And Sing #2: The Ribcage Epistle

1.
In common medical jargon, the combined bones of the thorax that enclose the heart and lungs are called a “ribcage.”

2.
The ribcage was first described as such in the writings of Henri de Vessallo, a learned butcher of the Middle Ages.

3.
Henri, I wish I was with you now:
we’d break ribcages together, create
new metaphors for the bars of bones
that enclose the freedom of breath and blood;
we’d speak together and maybe share a sandwich
if we could, and I would name that too, stealing thunder
from that yet-to-come insufferable Earl,
another dead white man stealing my thought
before I had the chance to be known for it; then again,
I’d call it a sandwich because that’s how learned it
at my mother’s knee, and here we are again, Henri —
in the prison of the Earl’s naming —
are you getting all this?

4.
Certain hallucinatory drugs, in the hands of an experienced shaman, may melt the ribcage altogether and leave the body so flexible that it can pass through its own third eye.

5.
Shaman, meet Henri
who is munching his sandwich as we speak,
eating the oppression of naming.  Forget him,
he belongs to the stanza before last.  You and I
will now go hungry, swallowing the ayahuasca’s fire
and traveling then into the mouth of the dragon,
plummeting like insult down his throat until we decide
to go into his blazing lungs — and what’s this,
up here, surrounding his coal-hot heart, his furnace
of agony, but the same old bones holding him safe —
is this a ribcage, dammit?  I thought
we’d gotten away from this.

6.
The ribcage of a roasted chicken, when boiled for soup, will dissolve and free the space inside.

7.
So, back at Henri’s place,
we’re sitting around, the three of us
(the shaman having returned with me, demanding
a sandwich, calling it “the meat book of eating”)
and imagining new words for things.  I say I shall call
the dragon’s skeleton “the twin bone ladder of the chest,”
but Henri thinks that’s ridiculous.  “Call it a damn ribcage,
everyone else does, stop being such a damn poet,”
says Henri.  The shaman says, “Is there any soup
to go with this meat book of eating?”  “We call that
a sandwich,” I tell him.  “Like the Earl of Sandwich?”
asks the shaman.  “Yeah, just like that,” I respond.
“Ah, pity — he is going to be such an asshole
once he’s born and grows into it,” he sighs.
And Henri looks around for something else to label
with a perfectly good and logical name,
while I am impaled on the jealousy in my chest
that hides there, imprisoned in my —

dammit.