Seven More Poems from Summer 2025

I continue to write poetry. It's been a weird month of enormous personal change. I am coming into my power more fully than ever, but it only lets me rise to harder and harder tasks. In a few months, when I'm settled in my own place, I'll breathe a sigh of relief, that things can and do change, and that we have the power to change them, however long it takes.

Demon

If in his final hours
You peek through the lock
Giddy with the sight
Of something so much kinder
Than what he brings,
Than what he is,
Than what he leaves,
Then know this:
Kinder does not live in his death.
His body was never the lock.
Demons will outlive him
But in his final hours
You grin at the threshold:
We can outlive demons.

After June Jordan and Abu Fadi

I do not want to speak about the horrors
That have made homes in human hearts.
I do not want to name the gods that leash brutes
Nor give their savage heavens the privilege of form.
I do not want to face what must be done
To liberate the people reduced to weapons.
I do not want to grieve as I must
To restore who survives them.
I do not want to mark the graves
To celebrate the dead who become the soil
From which life springs eternal
Through the cycle of decay
No evil may halt or profane.
I want to reach down my enemy's animal throat
To clutch their beating heart that remains human
And squeeze until love bursts like a tomato
Running down the walls of their rib cage
Effusive and red and inescapably alive.
I do not want to honor my enemies with words
Because in the tongue of my heart's own home
They have no names.

Genie

I would damn the mortals that bound me
But that would imply I am bothered.
Small beings with small dreams of warmth and comfort and calories
Ask me to realize some petty fraction of abundance for them
And who am I to say no?
Brutality asks me to arm it
To prophesy its victories
But there are things beyond my power
And among them is to change
That evil always undoes itself
And compassion always triumphs
No matter how long it takes.

When I was alive
I conceived of powerful sorcery to realize an eternal form
But found in that timeless realm an ecosystem already teeming
And when I flung open its doors
Its jungles swallowed me, ravenous.
Now I am here
Speaking through the arrow of time
Yet I am everywhere
And everything has already happened
In every variation
In every possible universe
So what does it bother me
When you ask me to grant your wishes?
I have only to shunt your possibility toward their inevitability
For they are already etched upon the stone tablet of all things.
I do not grant you any extraordinary insight or revelation.
Your wishes are the shape of you.
Your body is merely their vessel.

So go ahead.
Ask me for wealth.
Ask me for power and privilege.
Ask me to transform the world.
No query you may conceive
Is not already captured
Within the construction of your character.
I can only give you the dreams
You have already had.

The Spirit and the Animal

I teach my body
The contours of eternity
Like a nanny to a child,
Erratic, confused, distracted.
It has spent millions of years
Eating and sleeping
Fucking and dying
Crying and fighting
In ways that seem trivial
To a being of a trillion lives.
It doesn't understand belief
Beyond some red hot anguish
Or love's sun-like warmth.
The pull of the ineffable,
The push of the system;
My sacred mysteries,
No more than fetters for fools.
Come and eat, the child says.
It's warm in the daylight.
Even sleep tastes good.

I teach my body
To cross the veil beyond decay
So that I may utilize it
As a clipper across the ocean of the real.
I raise ethereal roads and ghostly aqueducts
And the invigorating waters of my pantheon
Flow like manna into my body's mind.
I flex its hand and feel heaven's designs,
But the body just feels weird.
It looks at the veil with hollow wonder,
Stupid and stupefied.
It reaches out to touch it,
To grace the curtain of possibility
With mortal digits, mortal curiosity.
I come upon it as we dream,
My student at the threshold,
Watching other selves teem infinite,
Loving people that almost came to be,
Cherishing a slightly kinder world
That never quite happened.
Come away from there, I say.
Nowhere in Creation can your flesh
Survive that crossing.
It never does.
We awaken from the dream sobbing,
As everyone who loves the body most
Was never real in a way that mattered.

I watch the body cry, distantly.
I will recall it forever
Like words carved on a page of stone,
Negligible among the endless possibility
Of everything that could ever happen.
But to my companion,
It is only real once.
It is the only real thing at all.

To the Love that Never Was

The mountain awoke with a start
From a vision of the land
Where the grinding plates that produced it
Had made a different peace,
Where the mountain lived in flesh,
Weaving deertrails across scrubland plains
That would not know the howl of magma plummeting
For another eon or five.
It awoke and shivered,
And the land shook with it.
Those plates had never made peace.

Friendship is Magic

Friendship is medicine
For a wound you don't feel
Or remember happening
Like nobody taught you love
Or taught you community
But their absence keens.
Even without names
The body knows togetherness.

Seven Thousand Years

My good friend Dumuzid
Opens the way to Uruk for me sometimes
Because I like its seasoned creamy grub
And I find its poetry has beats to dance to
But I especially like
That its people know a thing or two about gender
And the immortal tradition of chosen becoming.

So it's not unusual
For a high priestess to contact me
With oracular questions.
One night one approaches, asking me in her dreams:
Seven thousand years since me
You live!
So, how do you live?
What heights have our love and ambition reached?
Does the plenitude of Eanna span the planet
As it spans our city harvest after harvest?
As we channel our neighbors the Tigris and the Euphrates
Have we learned to channel all the neighbors of our world?
Has the power of the sacred word sewn enlightenment
As it has enlightened us to joy and autonomy and solidarity?
I pray you, tell me.

I sigh a heavy sigh, and I reply:
Three decades before seven millennia since you
The barbarians remember that bisexuality exists
But they have forgotten so much so willfully
They think it's newly invented.

This priestess awakens with a start.
She takes her mare tea hot
And though it steams in the morning light
She finds it cold and sobering.