2/30 – Privilege

Privilege is…

…the choice of forefathers to have come here, to have not arrived in chains.

…the ability to not be inherently more likely to be shot.

…whole personhood from the founding of the country of your birth.

…a lottery of melanin,
of economic status,
of opportunity.

…being able to discuss the advantages that I have inherently, because I pass,
gone are the circumspection of circumcision,
gone are quarrelsome curls that announce my otherness,
gone my kippa and tzitzit that says that I’m Hebrew,
Kike, Christ-killer, Juden, Jew,
and Roma, Kalderashi, there is nowhere to call home,
pogroms should be all I know –
privilege is not having ever been driven from somewhere,
my ancestors on either side never knew such,
black men and women in America have never known such,
the First Peoples here have never known such,
the Mexican People have never known such,
this land is built on the bodies of “others” brought here,
granted no rights and worked to their deaths,
privilege is being able to shrug this inhumane history off ourselves.

…perpetual because we’ve let it.

…running rampant because we believe there are more of them,
or that they are more powerful,
but we are what we have always been,
we are WHO we have always been,
the oppressed,
the irreverent,
the dreamers,
the believers,
we are righteous in our indignation,
we are at the end of our rope,
we are ready for revolution,
we cannot have more of the same,
privilege is the right of the strong and the lame.

…available to us all. It is ours for the taking.

…being at the precipice of this coming change.

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Kisses

And the altar of our love was wrought in the dusky darkness of a parking lot,
where the sun and the moon came to light our world
when two lips that spent years in the service of speaking went silent
and sought only the sweet serenity
of seeking the other,
satiation in the subtlety of sparingly pecking and tenderly touching,
our tongues tearing past the safety of mouths to taste eternity of the soul expressed in the nearness and the love that could not be suppressed.

Dear Jill

Dear Jill,

You were serenity and defiance wrapped in a quilt of tattoos and tenacity,
Calamity was your calling card and I should have known better but I couldn’t help it,
you kissed strangers and left me wanting,
even more so in your engagement that you would eventually fulfill,
but you let me bare your breasts and in turn I bared my scars to you.

We ate our insecurities with our late-night breakfast and never made it to dessert,
you were much too beguiling for banana cream pie,
incandescent only in the candlelight that let me keep on burning for you;
we took a left at Albuquerque and arrived in Antarctica,
late night texts turned from arbitration to arbitrary.

I became an artifact of your once-wily ways now lost to time and matrimony,
A photo long deleted on a phone from two lives ago;
I never got my fairy tale,
Just grim reality,
Where hearts are broken every day,
And then some day you meet the grave.

Paper Swans

You made them so miniscule,
paper swans an atoms’ width,
you made them with
pulp from a peach tree;
solemnly you separated the cyanide with
the center fold and
flapping wings from the fuzz.

Moon Too?

I am staring at the moon,
it is full and orange, round,
its face seems inquisitive, wondering,
it makes me wonder what you’re doing.

End of April – NaPoWriMo #30

You are coming to a close, o’ calendar mark of adversity.

When we beware the Ides of March it is because it heralds you,
You three-year memorably difficult month,
All challenges, all obstacles, all stumbling blocks,
All triumphed over,
Because April showers bring Mayflowers and pilgrims always struggle to survive.

This month I learned:

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