StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. XLV

I did not choose to go to battle,
Al Qaida and the Taliban flew a plane into me:
The world splits and, dead in the other,
I go on in this one,
Having crossed the wire and returned,
To remember all those who never come home again.

The grass is already turning brown,
The morning glory's wrinkled up,
The birds busy getting ready
For the winter storms to come.

Orion's rising, the leaves are falling,
Fat squirrels are burying their nuts,
The deer are scattered, practicing deception,
The hunters will be 'round before long.

And when those snows finally cover the ground,
The birds will huddle in the bushes and hunker down,
And everyone everywhere will be getting slowly ready
For bright daffodils to bloom and spring to come.

Nary a cement or hoary asphalt
As yet has turned to autumn color;
No bright reds adorn the dull ashen buildings,
Even the monument is still stark white;
No orange or yellow dab the walls of the Pentagon
And Lincoln's beard is still firmly unfallen.
The Shenandoah is further distanced
Than all the miles any goose might fly
And unfathomable light years beyond
What your GPS might suggest.

Will I be dead a year from now,
My body decaying or in ashes?
Perhaps, but I think not,
For I do not wish it so
And my doctors all like my money.

A century from now, even I have doubts,
A hundred fifteen, one hundred twenty,
The current boundary rigorously enforced
By the nature of our bodies,
Finds me halfway there.

I've a run of good luck, look at it that way,
Although I concede I am part of that luck,
I hear the echo of my own blood pulsing,
Crawling and weeping, as I creep through the grass,
The waste and spoilage of a century passed.

Fear, desolation, loneliness, rage,
Then slowly gone, cursing my futility:
The chair dissolves, the fabric falls,
The stars go cold and the universe dims,
To earth, to ground, and ever silent.

The shake, the spear,
The muddy grubberly,
The shimmering intricacies and Golden Ships
Driven mad by the impossibility of it all;

Had the ancient timelines still connected
Second to second, year to year,
The earth would rain people
From its warm acid fog,
The sun would still shine
In crystalline perfection
Over the center of it all.

I have seen pictures of this place,
Have heard the waterfalls showering me
With stars, yet I would take the Gold Ship
Again, if offered, into the up and out
Until the last ragged dance
Fades unevenly to black.

We die the long slow death of entropy,
The cold boredom of ancient wisdom
Grown colder in time and space,
In a universe where life is frequent but fleeting
And moves inevitably toward greater disorder,
Until the all and everything exists
In perfect equilibrium, sinless evermore.

The day he died is thin and insubstantial,
An unequivocable transubstantiation
Before my outer appearance dare change,
And my mind, that ethereal self
That passes between shadows,
Surrendered all pretense of duality
And irrevocably laid claim to my birthright.

What emerged is the implacably reality
Of my existence, the moment of bright truth
That birthed both woman and poet,
Freeing these words to challenge both fate and stars
Unshackled from familial expectations
And earthbound ecclesia.

My revolution was no less inevitable than the Maelstrom
That brought Grant victory at Richmond,
No less a civil war within me than Antietam and Gettysburg
And Sherman's indominable march to Atlanta and the sea,
No less final than the southern assassin who ended Lincoln's life
Only to punctuate the seachange that was to follow.

I sing the world transluminal,
Giving voice to both my body and soul;
In limb and hip, the soft bounce of breast,
I embrace the round swell of my flesh
Flushed full with ancient universes,
Standing or falling with brain and conformation,
The lips, the nipples, the tears and laughter,
The blood and marrow of my soul eternal.

Three Glocks in the hallway,
Three Glocks buying coffee,
Waiting in line, ordering latte;

In another century
They would probably be smoking
And the two young women
Replaced by middle-aged men.

Don't try this at home,
I am, afterall, a professional,
A university trained street poet,
Goodly versed in strategeries
And imaginations.

I have walked with the best of them,
Dallied with the worst
And borrowed what I needed;
Well learnt in Shakespeare and other,
Less categoric poetic magics,
I restructured them to my own conceit;
Alluding to most ancient metricals,
My illustrations draw from the distant future,
Transported across the continnuum
To be molded by your ever present poet.

I write archaically with a pen in a journal.
Edit on my computer screen as the need arises
-- Those are only the accidentals, of course,
For we know, you and I, that all the heavy lifting
Goes on inside the folds and pathways inside my brain:
Neurobiology is everything and the poetry readings,
The hand corrected revisions, merely a product
Of what I can neither teach nor explain.
I am a poet, a woman of flesh and blood,
And can no more elucidate how it is I do
What it is I do than I can a bodyquaking orgasm
-- But both the poet and the orgasm continue to exist
And I am the better woman for it.