I who would not be tamed
have turned my mind to taming you.
The world is out to rub our edges off:
we must bend and submit, bend and submit.
I don the jacket and the boots,
send forth into a marked arena decorous with flowers
the crazy horse I bought in Newry
and we dance to the manager’s choice of pastel tunes;
an elderly aristocrat in a parked car
dictates her opinion on our movements
to a thirteenth century scribe: tense
or not tense, accurate or crude.
Why am I learning? Why are you yielding?
I want to drive smack into a concrete wall
singing I am an Antichrist, I am an Anarchist
at the top of my unacceptable lungs.
I never wanted to be in it for the long haul.