I've been thinking also about this notion of safe spaces.
What does it mean?
What does it encompass?
Who does it encompass?
And perhaps most urgently, is it even possible?
And for myself, I always felt that safety was more
a sensation or a feeling than a space.
And particularly, on the margins,
I felt that perhaps safety is synonymous to joy
and pleasure--
those sensations.
And so I thought, well, I better go ahead and write an ode
to masturbation.
This method of inexhaustible joy.
Ode to Masturbation.
"Because you were never holy, only
beautiful enough to be found with a hook in your mouth.
Water shook like sparks when they pulled you out.
And sometimes, your hand is all you have
to hold yourself to this world.
And it's the sound, not the prayer that enters.
The thunder, not the lightning that
wakes you in the back seat, midnight's neon parking lot.
Holy water, smeared between your thighs, where no one ever
drowned from too much thirst.
The cum shot in articulation of chewed stars.
So lift the joy-crusted thumb, and teach the tongue
of unbridled nourishment.
To be lost in an image, is to find within it a door.
So close your eyes and open.
Reach down with every rib, humming the desperation
of unstruck piano keys.
Some call this being human, but you already
know it's the briefest form of forever.
Yes, even the Saints remember this.
The if under every utterance beneath the breath,
brimmed like cherry blossoms, foaming into no one springtime.
How often these lines resemble claw
marks of your brothers being dragged away from you.
You, whose name not heard by the ear, but the smallest
bones in the graves.
You who ignite the April air with all your petals
here, here, here.
You who twist through barbed wired light,
despite knowing how color beckons decapitation.
I reach down, looking for you in American dirt,
in towns with names like hope, celebration, success,
and sweet lips like Little Saigon, towns
like Laramie, money, Jasper, and Sanford towns.
Whose trees know the weight of history
can bend their branches to breaking lines.
Whose roots burrow through stones and hard facts,
gathering the memory of rust and iron, mandibles, and amethyst.
Yes, touch yourself like this.
Part the softness hurts, unhealable hunger.
After all, the Lord cut you here,
to remind us where he came from.
Pin this antlered heart beat back to Earth.
Cry out until the dark fluence, each faceless beast banished
from the Ark, as you scrape the salt of the cock,
clit, and call it daylight.
Don't be afraid to be this luminous.
To be so bright, so empty.
Their bullets pass right through you,
thinking they have found the sky.
As you reach down, press a hand to this blood warm body
like a word being nailed to its meaning and lives.