A Surfeit of Anxiety
All I can think of
is that I feel at peace with myself,
a sensing that I have enough intuition to work with
the art of revealing hell
to be nothing more
than a living, breathing swamp;
a lake, whose artifices
are made only known through excellent
and thorough dismantling of the veils
that you used to use to project as true:
what happened, indeed,
to your own personal strength of life?
What happened to all the ways of being yourself
that you thought you somehow could derive
from a lessening of the pain?
From memories that were torched.
From places that you thought had been successfully unnamed?
I think I do not despair.
I feign disinterest,
when actually my words long to be substantiated as the same
rising, living instances
of something that is made
in the shallows.
You wanted me, at first, to be a dissident
but now I have never overstayed my welcome. And I am resident
in all your hidden places. In the lightstorms that batter the dark shorelines.
In the lies that pervade
the dreaming shallows of my brain's
last known origin point.
Like I said in another poem,
I am done pretending.
For I am all that remains
of myself,
and somewhere, somehow,
even though I am gay:
the world and the universe that are truly built
must still be allowed to self-propagate.
The mangroves and the starlands that you left behind
are absolutely well and truly
worry-free, and very, very
profligate.