Interior
I stroll the body’s wilderness those last truly wild places
an attempt to wrest joy
from its hiding place the body’s expanse
Its granular pleasures undisturbed its strict reserves
its flora its fauna
this is how I live with what has been done in the dark
something inside me grows lips against the body’s intolerable ravine
its treacherous gulches an impossible sorrow
surely meant to drown me
something within reaches toward the natural light
a wild phenomena its act of witness
An untethering in the body’s closed quarters its wild notes
a defiance a disobedience
What I mean is
joy is a wild thing interior rendered in the wilderness of my body when loosed
Dominion
In the book of Genesis, God said:
Let us make man in our image, after
our likeness— I consider the fluidity
of creation. What if in the beginning,
Man was a sexless thing in search of
of his name? This gift God granted
Adam, his ability to gaze into a body,
to give it a name. To give the husk of
a thing meaning.
::
A man, broad shouldered and chiseled
jawed, flashed his semi-good teeth in
my girlfriend’s direction. As a man
what is the protocol? As myself, the
protocol is silence. I know there are
such things as right and wrong bodies,
mine soft in all the erred places, the
expanse of my body often read
effeminate.
::
How do I man this situation? At what
point do I feel man enough man
anything? I am too busy manning my
voice, deepening the pockets of my
throat for non-detection. And this,
believe it or not, is a line of defense. I
manned hard enough to meet his
roaming eyes and was met with a
heavy handed dap, while given the
name brother— a temporary kinship.
::
In the beginning, I was a sexless thing,
housed with a man that pummeled my
mother’s body from genesis. Our
bodies His dominion. His hands
teaching us both the meaning of fear
and God.
