Words to Start Fires

Don’t ask me to explain the black finger prints I leave.I watched them killing my dog.Dangerous, of course, to draw parallels between the deliberate murder of unconditional love and the need to write.

Sing it loud, especially if they don’t believe you.Even the blind can feel computers falling from the sky.Crossing out erases nothing. The theory of the unified self doesn’t work.“All menshould get a Prince Albert so they can bleed for five days from their genitals oncein their lives” said the man at the convention.My heart is a fancy plate found in St. Vinny’s.

Every hairdresser I’ve gone to in the last five years has said “try younger men.”Rinse the dead out of your cells with alcohol or flame, ink and needles.The pain you choose is different.“Why isn’t there more meat on this chicken?” he asked me, squeezing my ribs till they bruised.Every slap was an accident, and he would stand over me, beating himself of and crying.My father spent nights in the bathroom reading Jokes for the John.My older sister drew concentric circles on that door and made me wash it clean and apologize.My body walked me places I had never been, tucked safe in an inside pocket.Be quiet and good and bad things will happen.

American gods are so testy.“Where did they all vanish to?” I asked a policeman one night.He glared at me and swung his nightstick, keeping the peace.Saying the pledge of allegiance to their hate, kissing it good night. Tucked in tight with the ropefrom that flag around your neck as the kindest nanny says,“It’s all a matter of interpretation.”I could not see the ghost, even when I waited for the holy spirit to descend at my confirmation.The body has no thoughts that were not instilled by connection.Images of floating face down in water, open-eyed to please someone.

I am waiting for my country to finish being born.It’s difficult when there is no character in the script drawn for you. It is difficult when yourexistence relies     on being seen     by people who want to ignore you.

I am on the side of the small child in the rain. I give her exact change to get home.When she gets home, her father beats her for getting lost.She runs into a church to avoid him and a nice Priest makes her say 50 Acts of Contrition for notrespecting fathers.She paints a palm tree on his head as he sleeps.     You can image his response.All clothing is costume.

Is this Ariel able to grow voice or destined to be sea foam? What can poetry do to save her?If we do not save her, are we damned to be her?I realized that I made you up to be like me, then forgot your name.

Burn this.

Note

“Ariel” is the title of Sylvia Plath’s famous collection of poems. It is also the well-known heroine in Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid, from the tale by Hans Christian Andersen (written in 1836). Fairy tales are cautionary tales, I teach my student writers. “Hansel and Gretel” warns children of the dangers in the woods, and those of us in Wisconsin do not forget Jeffrey Dahmer, who lived in Milwaukee. Many fairy tales are directed at young women. In “The Little Mermaid” Ariel has a voice and is half fish. You cannot fuck a fish. She trades her voice for legs—a nineteenth-century slang expression meaning “sexually available”—to try to gain the love of a generic Prince, a powerful man. Becoming sexually available, she loses her voice, her ability to speak for herself, to sing, to write poems. The Prince has sex with her, but this does not lead to love, and in the Hans Christian Andersen tale she becomes seafoam. She becomes nothing, totally annihilated. Women are in the quandary of trying to be heard, to write and speak + be...