PATHWAYS: FROM MOTHER TO MOTHER
Tadpoles are legless and never learn to curtsy
birds cannot pee
in spring
black snakes go crazy
bowing out of the presence of kings.
Digging beneath a river bed
whose heart is black and rosy
I find the sticky ooze I learned
rejecting all my angels.
It puzzled my unborn children
and they paused in my frightened womb
a decade or two long
breaking apart what was begun
as marriage. My mother wept.
Fleshy lemmings dropped like corn
into her hopper
popping as they hit the water
and hungry tadpoles
winnowed up my falls.
Wherever she wore ivory
I wear pain.
Imprisoned in the pews of memory
beneath the scarlet velvet
is a smile. My mother
weeping
gouts of bloody wisdom
pewed oracular and seminal as rape
pursues me through the nightmares
of this wonderland of early learning
where I wander cryptic as a saint
tightmouthed as cuttlefish
vital flaws unstitched like crazy patchwork
until analyzed and useless I
crest in a shoal of missing mommies
paid and made in beds of consecration
worshiped by rituals in which
I do not believe
nor find a place to kneel and rest
out of the storm of strangers and demands
drowning in flooded churches
thick with rot and swollen with confusion
lashed to a raft of grins aligned in an enemy reason
I refuse to learn again.
Item: birds cannot pee
and so they shat upon our heads
while we learned how
to bow
out
of the presence of kings.