I’m a pop song
once mistaken for holy truth
by someone who heard me
at a perfect fallow moment.

Does it matter that they
misinterpreted me
and believed me to be
greater than I am?

I doubt myself as a result.
I question their faith,
dismiss it as so much
transference, then a small voice

tells me I should instead
be living up to those
operatic expectations. Whenever I
have tried that, I have been

terrified of the responsibility
that weighed in with it. Still,
I have tried it; I have noticed
changes in rhythm, in melody;

something under the arrangement
that estranges me from my known self,
pushes me to ask what I am and
what I am missing.

I turn again and again
back to my memory of them.
See them listening to me
as if I held all meaning,

all truth for them. I listen,
straining to hear
the same,
and it’s good. It is fine.

There are times when I am fluid
and beautiful, when I lie exquisitely
in service to the struggle like a well-worn hilt
in a master swordsman’s hand; other times

I’m all spikes and protrusions when gripped,
and all the struggle can do
is drop me from its grasp
for fear of my damage.

I would tell you I am the site of the struggle
but the lie embedded in that is cold,
sharp, and slippery with others’ blood.
I could tell you I don’t want justice

but I do want to be fluid and beautiful,
and if that’s how I get there then by all means
I am for justice — but that is also a lie,
one as hot as the previous lie was not.

What I want is negation. I want to skip history.
I don’t want to be here. I don’t want 
to have been here. I want for neither 
cold nor heat.  I want the cup to pass from me

and then I want to skip all of it: not fluid,
not beautiful, not sharp and impossible to hold.
I want to vanish into the past and be forgotten,
to have no qualities at all, to be forever

unscourged and unpraised
for what I did or did not do for the cause of Justice.
Invisibility, insignificance, even in fact
never to have been incarnate, as far as

the world can remember. That would be Justice
I think — to be unremarked among the faceless
of history. I feel it every time, until I am seized by History
and then, with a sigh, with a moan, I give myself away.

We all think 
it will be obvious that
it’s coming: a disease with
documented progression, 
an increasing need to escape
rotten biochemistry, proximity
to a deepening war zone, 
risky behavior rendering us
so top heavy we’ll clearly
topple very soon. Instead 

the moment comes
in an accident beyond
the sciences’ ability to predict,
an aneurysm previously hidden
from view, a random bullet
or stray blade slipped in
when we aren’t looking.

I pray to have a lover’s name
upon my lips when it comes,
or some poetic circumstance
to frame it if I am silenced before
I can get a word out — and of course,
I pray that whatever art I leave
as a last utterance or imprint
says something worthy of it
being my last.

I pray like that each time
I sit down to the Work, as if 
I only ever have one more to offer
before I go. It humbles me
that I never feel I’ve been right,
never good enough to be finished. 

Maybe I stay alive because of that,
though I am not so vain as to think
I am kept alive for it by Something Larger —

no, not me. But I do believe 

there’s an organ inside me
that knows this, and as if it were 
another person within — sure, 
call it a Muse if you must — it keeps
shaking its metaphorical head, saying,

not yet,

I’ll let you know. You’ll know 
when I know, and when I know
it may or not be too late to be perfected,

but whatever the one before you go
will be, it will have to do;

so practice, practice, then let this go.

When the edge seems close,
step up to it. Take a long view
over the land below. See waters,
trees, deserts, stones. Look hard
at the distance from your feet
to the bottom of the gorge 
that you must travel to reach
the paradise you can see.

You can choose to turn away
or choose the leap,
you can choose to climb down,
you can try to fly.

You will not likely get there

but the fact
that it’s still going to be there
whether you abandon
or die in the attempt to reach it
is all you need to know
to understand why this feels like 
the only worthwhile moment of choice
in your enfeebled life,

and that thin, crumbling edge
where you stand
suddenly looks like 
the Path.

An emergency game
of back and forth
as I try to fix myself.

How much I depend upon
the vanity of thinking 
such things.

I still imagine I’m
repairable. I still put it
in writing.  I still put it

out there. An emergency
back and forth, a triage
disguised as tug of war.

Everyone who can see
knows the game i’m playing
and how played out it is,

how I have played myself.
There’s no real emergency
in this back and forth.

The tug of war as always ends with both sides
sprawled and defeated yet
I imagine tomorrow will somehow be different.

oh, fuck it. you 
are not a mistake 
or a problem, not at all.
no matter what you’ve been told.
fuck it. you live in a society
that was built by shifting blame.
do not believe in it or accept it
as the way things should be.
delight instead in how resistance
can be framed as a dance.
delight instead in how you have survived
such things. delight in your own being.
you were not made to work this hard.