PASSING THROUGH

birth was her first catastrophe

wet and unyielding

she wailed screaming like a poem

bleaker than Plath

this is it she reckoned

this leaky ballast

what if she asked them

to leave her alone

those aliens called parents

her sham called a home

she grew from the nettles

too often grasped

envious of fences white

yet still masked

avoiding the snares

she kept to a rule

golden and solid rejected by fools

she grew from the lies in empty rooms

learning simple clues

on where to roam

she grew thick like a weed

in her vacant lot heart

staring sometimes at her white-hot flesh

lit by the light of her tenderness

at darkness aground

she travelled with ghosts those

companions profound

grew from the murders she

meant to believe

had meaning had sound

but I’m just a girl she cried

hungover and older

engrossed with the thrall

of the times they are changing

renewed with the chorus

we sing to with aging

born free she was and still remains

a woman with oars on

a boat run aground

it comes back to nothing

she drains the hole in her head

passing through again and again

for the time calculated

devoted to anger

those truths she craves

that range further and further

those stories she’s told

passing through ages

in glorious rhyme

on camouflage pages

these stories she tells until

everything’s new

these stories she tells until

her passage is through

3.19.20 NYC