It has taken me this long

because 

it was not always

my choice to make.  

For so long

there were no doors 

that I could shut 

and have them stay shut.  

The fevers of my childhood–

when I would hallucinate myself 

a traveler 

along the skinny dunes

of my own arms– 

they taught me 

to imagine the body 

as a country unto itself.  

So I erected walls 

raised armies

to die on every blade of grass  

And I became

a ferocious guardian 

of my own interior, 

country of 

merciless boundaries, 

turning away 

even the clouds.    

But the grass 

brittled.

The people got hungry, 

fled in the night,

never returning.

And so 

it’s taken me this long

to say it–

Let me show you

this place 

of painful beauty:  

the homeless elderly 

eating 

the pastor’s stew and rice 

toothlessly.  Walking back

into the deadly winter.  

Still fighting for it.  

The boys 

circled on the sidewalk

at 2AM, taking turns 

slugging each other in the arms, 

flagging opposing territories

of body and spirit.  

And another boy at the top of a magnolia tree, 

watching the day end, ignoring 

his mother’s shouting,

his heart softly smoldering inside 

the body that keeps him there.

Waiting for God to pass 

like a great balloon

that his tiny hand might grasp.