after David Wojnarowicz


Cadmium yellows on a felt brush won’t make it true.
You’ll hover there, living your life in the middle
of a forgotten sentence, incomplete. You’ll feel sure
your worn-away face is a most obvious tell, and still

the sense there is more to do won’t fall away. You work
to scrub it, clench steel wool, and rid yourself of this
thing, like it’s skin you can rid of skin. But no page will
make it true. Instead, swimming in the cold gray ocean—

why didn’t you? Why didn’t you write a thousand poems
about the lonely hallway inside of you, why didn’t you call
when there will be people who love you in this life,
and you’ll siren rubble still. Alive and destroyed.

Bring yourself to the water table, still. No matter how low
in the limestone you must go, how torn, arcane, and severed
you feel, bring the aquifer to your lips, press your mouth
against you. If it can be the hour, call the hour. Your hushed

terrors, angers with no moral rail, let it all come to us by you,
amidst cursing the pick-axed men that knicked your teeth small,
within visions of how this world’s fetish for hierarchy dissolves,
this is a story after all. Surely, it comes when everything is allowed

to be a sky, unconditionally, everywhere and full. Come
onto the carousel, plunge into the grooves, haunted and holy,
between the soil, between centuries, between promise, corral
your chosen moments from a past leaves nothing behind.

Rain. Sky, sun, sky: what of your long seasons? Let
what little things let you feel loved—and loving—tremor
and come forth. Withstand the erosions, the storms
that decimate and deploy and give your life

new beginnings again. Trudge like an ox, so
enthralled by sight. Feel like one—why wouldn’t you—
for each scarce sip of water performs an interdiction.
Further yokes it to a most earnest plan.