WEBVTT

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I've been thinking also about
this notion of safe spaces.

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What does it mean?

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What does it encompass?

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Who does it encompass?

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And perhaps most urgently,
is it even possible?

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And for myself, I always
felt that safety was more

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a sensation or a
feeling than a space.

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And particularly,
on the margins,

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I felt that perhaps safety
is synonymous to joy

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and pleasure--

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those sensations.

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And so I thought, well, I
better go ahead and write an ode

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to masturbation.

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This method of
inexhaustible joy.

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Ode to Masturbation.

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"Because you were
never holy, only

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beautiful enough to be found
with a hook in your mouth.

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Water shook like sparks
when they pulled you out.

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And sometimes, your
hand is all you have

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to hold yourself to this world.

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And it's the sound, not
the prayer that enters.

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The thunder, not
the lightning that

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wakes you in the back seat,
midnight's neon parking lot.

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Holy water, smeared between
your thighs, where no one ever

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drowned from too much thirst.

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The cum shot in articulation
of chewed stars.

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So lift the joy-crusted
thumb, and teach the tongue

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of unbridled nourishment.

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To be lost in an image, is
to find within it a door.

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So close your eyes and open.

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Reach down with every rib,
humming the desperation

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of unstruck piano keys.

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Some call this being
human, but you already

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know it's the briefest
form of forever.

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Yes, even the Saints
remember this.

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The if under every utterance
beneath the breath,

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brimmed like cherry blossoms,
foaming into no one springtime.

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How often these
lines resemble claw

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marks of your brothers
being dragged away from you.

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You, whose name not heard
by the ear, but the smallest

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bones in the graves.

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You who ignite the April
air with all your petals

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here, here, here.

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You who twist through
barbed wired light,

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despite knowing how color
beckons decapitation.

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I reach down, looking
for you in American dirt,

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in towns with names like
hope, celebration, success,

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and sweet lips like
Little Saigon, towns

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like Laramie, money,
Jasper, and Sanford towns.

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Whose trees know the
weight of history

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can bend their branches
to breaking lines.

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Whose roots burrow through
stones and hard facts,

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gathering the memory of rust and
iron, mandibles, and amethyst.

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Yes, touch yourself like this.

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Part the softness hurts,
unhealable hunger.

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After all, the
Lord cut you here,

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to remind us where he came from.

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Pin this antlered heart
beat back to Earth.

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Cry out until the dark fluence,
each faceless beast banished

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from the Ark, as you scrape
the salt of the cock,

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clit, and call it daylight.

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Don't be afraid to
be this luminous.

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To be so bright, so empty.

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Their bullets pass
right through you,

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thinking they have
found the sky.

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As you reach down, press a
hand to this blood warm body

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like a word being nailed
to its meaning and lives.

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