I hadn't thought about reading this one,
but I think that I will.
"The zen garden is nice on the weekends
but the door will lock behind you."
This is a poem about visiting the VA Hospital in Phoenix.
"Here we are all thinking and not thinking about being dead,
We fight the dogs from our shoelaces and from each other
by holding their well decorated vests.
This place is full of bitches though you
can't say that, though you're a person rightfully pissed off.
We don't all want to be heroes, we don't all want to not die,
Except for this country, we don't want to die for that.
Leaving curved impressions terminal with no expectation
in return,
Leaving room to acknowledge capitalist patriarchy's
broad and coercive applications.
However meager or capacious the desire,
our statistics are inevitably abused.
Asked again whether I've considered
hurting myself or others ever or in the past two weeks,
I make a joke about the future, whose companion story dreams
itself in the obstacles budding across every new path to love.
It's that no path to forgiveness would look like this.
I say I'm sorry, I know this isn't funny.
But it was also a testimony to the enormous thing we
do to the extent we are able.
Forgiveness from who came a voice from across the room.
How long does it take if nothing was cut or crushed?
But the day hangs from jangling hooks above your sorry yellowing
head.
Three weeks into the prescription
I awoke thinking this is what it feels like to be white.
No one disagreed, it didn't make any sense,
anyway it didn't last.
The official formulas for suffering are mostly subjective.
I've accepted that I am one who will never suffer enough,
A position both intentionally obscuring and clear.
A quote from Ruth Wilson Gilmore,
'The United States was conceived in slavery
and christened by genocide.
These early practices established high expectations
of state aggression against enemies of the national purpose,
such as revolutionary slaves and Indigenous peoples,
and served as the crucible for development of a military
culture that valorized armed men in uniform as the nation's true
sacrificial subjects.'
End quote.
None of the signs say thank you for your left arm, or hearing,
or lymphatic health, or land.
I want to thank you for being alive,
And thank you unfortunately when it isn't what you want to be.
Thanks down to the lines creasing
your deeply infatuated head.
I wanted to volunteer for the vets against war crisis hotline,
Then I didn't write back or attend any medical appointments
that year.
I'm disappointed by the cadence of paltry confessions
I make in order to keep living.
Later, in the rooms where we can speak,
We want to know why do we feel so emotional."