2024-12-11

Je ne vais plus pleuer ; Je ne vais plus parler : Je me cacherais-là

I never got fisted by a stranger in the airport bathroom

I never slept with a man 20+ years my senior

I never had a gender or a identity

I never been to the Iowa Riders Workshop

I never sat on a plane crossed the Atlantic

I never was sent to jail (they tried)

I never received sympathy from all the eyes that could be made to look

I never took a antidepressant

I never won any race I started

I never found that sui-generis ability to be proven through and through

I never completed my ones and twos

I never got my package

I never slept alone

I never had that which was freely given,
until so compelled

I did have, though, in every season,
one friend or another

And, once, mired in the Olympian fen,
I saw a secret

Guarded on all sides by that perpetual engulfing moss,

Whose hosts' unrelenting greens

Deigned not to tell me what it means.

But they did say:

“What seems near is far away.
The secret just revealed to you
Is closer: in a thicket of kudzu.
It can be rediscovered, but ne’er spoke.”

And it burrows deeper with every toke,
I later found.