Call Out

Check yourself. There appears to be
a thin coating of slime
on your affirmation of purity,

a subtly gleeful aggression
in the way your principles allow you
such arrogance, perhaps indicative

of a willed inability to compare and contrast
your own righteousness on one subject
to your complicity on another.

If I were looking into a mirror
while doing and saying these same things
I hope I’d shut up and tear my face off.

If I found your face underneath mine
I do not know what I could do
except wall myself in with mirrors

so I would always remember
where I came from and never be able
to go back into the world.

If I later tore that face off to find beneath it
only the bones that history gave us both,
I would do the only thing left to do:

go back out there and let the people I’d hurt
judge me, then shun me or embrace me as they choose
while I bled and tried to grow something new.