Wishing

I throw a coin into the well,
Waiting a while to know
it has reached bottom.

Waiting for that sound I wish,
Fixation on the past—
Of lonely nights in bed
Deep red glass on the nightstand—
Fading to imagination.
Free me from this margin
I intone but suddenly find myself
Pausing…

Like creative bursts
From sitting by my willow,
Thoughts trickle into my head,
Without the usual reasonable limits.

A serpent wraps itself around me,
The uncomfortable tightness
in my chest intensifying:
Do I want to be freed from this margin?
I intone again
But there is only silence.

Hearing the distant plunk
I know what I have done.
I have wished to be freed
From this shadow zone.
Heavy in my mind is the realization:
I cannot take it back.

It escaped my lips and drifted off
Into Nature, into a power greater than
My own, a force more supreme and
Evocative than my simple humanity.

Where will I go if I am not in the margins?
I wonder staring up at the sky,
Indescribable blue, unblemished.
It is the place that I have always been,
From the nights as a child engrossed
In the fantasy world on page, unfurling
With talking mice, wizards and ghastly evil,
All seeped in man-made lore.

To those nights after bodily changes began,
cracking voice as body morphs,
carnal desire building, my newfound sexuality,
faggot, faggot I only heard.
I tried to hide it, pretend it was not me,
But what good did that bring me?


To those nights when the queer in me
Was comfortable, resting in my heart,
A point of shame no longer.
Ragdoll vanished, the image of me
sturdy in the wind,
Replaced instead by a disconnect,
Fine gossamer threads collapsed
With feeling like I did not fit in with anyone queer:
Intellectual building,
Postmodern deconstruction, leave nothing standing.
Perform gender…be nomadic,
voices of great wisdom told me.

The result: spectres of past experiences
Hissing acridly, no method of fumigation
When I knew only to question everything.
I found myself deconstructing me!

My body and mind scattered across some
vast landscape, ashes into the wind.
My mouth somewhere other than my head,
Only my ears listening to others,
always contemplating spoken words,
the poetry of it all and the harsh underbelly—
Lies, diminutive and brawny,
Lingering pointedly through harmonious facades.

So wrapped up in thought,
I am thrown back into the present world,
Realizing I am still hovering over the well.
If someone had passed by, I would have
Appeared to be suspended, standing up
Statuesque, in spirit of The Thinker.

Thus I wonder if it is at all possible for me
To ever break away from the margins.
After the proclamation and plunk—
Contract signed—
there has been no change,
Just endless suspension,
the pulling out of everything I tried to suppress,
Bringing a foggy world into a clearing
By shattering my own artifice.

Free me from this margin
I intone again.

But I quickly find myself laughing,
A noise that morphs into a blank expression,
And then again into a river down my cheek.
I cannot be freed and
I must not pretend.
It is who I am.