New poem (Draft)

Muscle Memory

The choice has been made.
We must wear our language,
make ourselves up in it.
From the development of vocabulary
comes the anticipation of situations,
and I find myself wondering if
the mad man who walked past me
teeth chattering in insult and obscenity
would have preferred the thrust of a knife
or the image of the thrust of a knife.
Our tongues know their movements too well
to unlearn embedded choreography.
Our minds, too, grow weak in habit:
with this poem, for example,
I meant to kill you.

Draft of new poem (will revise soon, hopefully)

Moon Bounce

The day you become a homosexual
is quiet and boring. Maybe the sky is overcast,
maybe you forgot to put deodorant on. The realization
most likely hits you in the afternoon;
it almost always comes in the afternoon,
just as you are about to write the day off
and decide—confirm—that you are to lounge
about the rest of the day because nothing
else seems worth doing.
Once you say yes quietly, in your head,
or start to cry, or blink quickly to feign
ignorance yet again, you’re done. You
have finished a process you thought would
take the rest of the day.

Though accomplished, you
still have some doubts about the whole business.
You fear you won’t be able to love any man
the way your mother loved you, and that’s troubling
the same way architects looking at the Parthenon
feel about anything they might do. You might not even
love yourself that much. This is the punishment
you feel you deserve for seeking independence in
your loving, and that fact stares you in the face
and makes breathing feel more like panting for awhile,
the way you would feel if you lived on the moon
your whole life and suddenly had to move to Earth
and learn to get used to a higher level of gravity.

New Poem

Sunday

I only ever feel powerful
when I type the words
“will understand” out
and watch the letters appear
on the screen, like a
new combination of
letters and words
that has never been seen
before. That I have
never seen before.

At these times,
invariably on Sunday afternoons,
I change the font size
to fifty, and consider
printing off two hundred
copies to hand out
to people or to tuck
into their pockets if
their hands are already full.