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MENDING
I hold these
truths to be self evident
Tasteless as a communion wafer
Yet with a hint of bitter almonds
Drinking the vintage of past hypocrisies
Absinthe
Because in the stench of charred flesh
In the smoke of the wreckage of 9-11
Perhaps we breathed in our own undoing
Accumulated a hatred that would gnaw our kindred spirits
Like a tumor
Until we were fragile
As I am now
A broken china doll
Perched on the shelf glassine eyes fixed in place
My mind recovered with glycine
Precious sterile
My body wracked with tardive dyskinesia
My synapses severed with tardive psychosis
But my cramped hand the scrivener
Still works and I write of its doing
And now they are taking notes
And if psychiatry could find its humanity
In the flickering twilight of that which leaps at me
The synapses they were twining into tardive psychosis
Became the persona of the little match girl
Perhaps we could find ours
Spent the year finding myself, finding others and causes to ignite
And in the somberness of faded leaves
And the lost lives of those spent
Defending a cause spitting out bullets
Automaton style
We all declined
Our freedoms lost
Now shivering in the cold
But was our humanity lost?
Look at each other
In the Victorian twilight
Of a decaying empire
That had declared war
On half of the nations
It sort to possess to imbibe
Some noxious poison that oozed
From the ground in black clots
That we were all now
As helpless as ivory chess pieces
And perhaps I was a pawn too
But I advanced across the maneuverings of the chess board
And found my way to tell them
To prove to them their humanity
The minds they sort to possess and consume
Were worth restoring instead
She was not the kind to let suffering overwhelm her
Each match was enough to set fire to parliament
And she warmed herself
Laid a black rose on Hans Christians Anderson’s grave
For he never realized his ambitions to become a poet
And we rose in the iced silence of an empire in embers
To reclaim our nation
And my recovered self sit by the computer
In the still hours of the late night on Medhellp, frost on the window
Talking down another suicide
And in my life there are no authority figures
I have lost all my fears
As fragile as a shawl
That cascaded across the wind swept plains
As the sand in the countries
We set to destroy formed a mandela
And each grain was one of our voices of protest
And together we will rise
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