For Mark, his mother and domestication

"for Mrs. Johnson whose cupboard doors have decoratively pierced tin panels"

do not enter me,

the town, the train station, the bagel shop,

the Alps, the Movie Mania alone. Take with you

the terrible, the prevalent, the prejudice, the particular,

the territorial. Get  a graduate degree in

terraces, in raised embankments

in miscreant, heretical trees;

the way the knee swells and the head

spins after riding in an airplane.

Now pair all of this with a broken heart,

or Tet after the winter solstice,

or the suicide of a friends transgendered son/

then allow your poetic a*s the reason

for blue and pink asters,

for tattooed arms or multiple piercings.

Because nothing, short of redemption,

is normal anymore.  When you saw

him last, the leather sash,

the opened toed paten pumps, his eyebrows arched

you thought, in that failed instance, of nothing else.

Only that this smooth, elegant place of compact plumage,

resembling nothing yet devoid of superfluity

is, after all, a life worth cherishing.

Reviews

[Ken Simm.]

This hangs in the air. Crystal, refined and simply gob smackingly beautiful. The trope 'gob smacking' I know is nowhere near what I mean, but I can think of nothing else that comes, even remotely close, to what I feel about this work. And art work it is. A light shining through memories with no side to it just the clear wish for redemption.

[Lydia Shutter]

There is no "normal" in our world....and perhaps that is a good thing. We have to learn to be a little more tolerant and understanding, don't we? No need to judge the tattoos or the piercings. Hey, just because I don't want them does not mean I have the right to tell someone else they can not have them. We all need to cherish our lives...and respect the lives of others! You have a special way of telling the world what they need to hear, Dana. Lydi**

[Emily B]

damn damn, damn, the rain falls, and these words melt my heart

[W.k.kortas]

Will we all be redeemed, then? It is odd, perhaps, that once we penetrate the sanctum of the metaphorical cupboards, we see and perhaps understand things we were sheltered from as children--our world not just "blue and pink asters", but tattoos and piercings and the blurring of the lines of boy and girl, and the final image--the viewing of the boy in "the opened toed paten pumps"--well, that is just powerful and affecting stuff. The core message, the moral of the story as it were, is (on its surface, at least) the stuff of Baptist Sunday School color-by-number books, that there is redemption, that all life is worth cherishing, but the trip to there shows us how hard-won that realization can be.

[writing mojo]

you know human is the ultimate tourist of experience...i get the connection from penny for thoughts to creature feature assassinations scenes of an uncivilized nation..this is how flags are woven and binds are broken through the struggle of living experimentation...excellent piece

[JC]

I get the feeling of reality, when you see so much so many other things seem so damn absurd, ridiculous...what takes precedence for some feels infantile..and is there anyway to get around this predicament? or is just the microcosm growing into the macrocosm again and again.. I gota feeling of existentialism and yearning to open minds...along with you way of creating subliminal imagery and metaphor...always a good thing coming to visit your neck of the woods