A Signature of Piss
You’re beautiful because for you, politeness is instinctive, not a marketing campaign. I’m ugly because desperation is impossible to hide. – Simon Armitage
i
With a squirrel’s unrest, I wanted to be calm,
like a forest where winds rarely storm into its leaves,
like a lake where fish rarely leap and dive back into its water.
But night brought me an earthquake to take me
deeper into its bowels. Day wanted to leave me
crunchy like charcoal. Everything’s a twister to twist me
chokingly. Calmness is a country I’ve never visited.
Eyes in their first extremity or their last never fancy
things unsafe as cornice fall on the leeward sides,
ears never the immaculate music of crash. Yet
my eyes and ears are forcibly glued to nightmares,
the ones rival armies did in the old or new Crusades.
After crippling losses, insanity reigns. It makes
my non-partisan self even lonelier, awaiting
persecution. Should I be cozying up to nightmares?
ii
Yes, the rhetoric of protest often heats up like politics
with no integrity at the core. Then I feel like breeding
American Pit Bull Terriers to fuck the bastards
who write on raped little angels, bombarded cities,
creepy excuses for WMDs, or whatever feels fit
to show in great words that they care. Squeeze
them hard. But no love will spill over to quench
your drought. They go from defiant to yielding
to the profitable bait. I slip out of their protesting line.
iii
In Berkeley you said you’d left a signature of piss –
at best a little fun out in the open. An amusement,
from your serious self. You’ve learned to use
the language of decorum even for smutty yellers
in their newly-energized brawls: Burn the thing down,
fuck the hell out of it and then see what happens.
I appreciate your decent protest. Simple as that.
But the charm of complexity consumes me.
And I start wondering how one can always
utter grievances in such exquisite gentleness,
the words of dissent in the grammar of approval.
Though I plunge to a decade low when confusions breed,
I shout to my surprise: Listen, I’m a little cockroach;
and all I say is – I badly need a new approach. A shocker?
I can see darkness brewing up breezily in light
and even happily lose its memory like a goldfish.
Those thick-headed brutes forget that daylight
silvers the dark corners of dissent in my mind.
Yes, I’m still a verb in the grammar of dissent,
a shuttle on the loom, from active to passive
and vice versa to make a dress with dissenting threads:
my work is its memory against forgetting. I wonder:
Am I the dullest, the sleepiest non-arguing cock?
Do I deserve an award for “Best Laughing Stock?”
Comedians brazen out the shit of their screenplays;
only the brutes with their sticky sugarcoated lies cheer
the hell out of us. But I’d rather love to stay clean.
I’m done with the baring of their canine teeth at me.
Whatever it takes, I won’t slink into my tortoise shell.
I’d leave a signature of piss on every deal they make.
***
This is the third poem in a 3 part series. Read the first two here.
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Photo by Annette Bernhardt/Flickr