girl song II
All the time in this world, what gets flung in my face
makes my hands go cold. I do not belong here, this
place does not belong to me, there is an ethic in play
here (no ethic) that almost stops my mind from going,
because it wants to, because that resistance, that
volition to silence me, presses on me like a slab of rock.
I have to coax myself back to me, I have to remember
I am not what they want me to be, want me to become
to make them unmistaken. It’s so much. Surfeit, shock,
and then to have to climb out, find language again, use
words as if they work, when my words of care found
bigot ears, and I heard scoff and all the old clichés,
particularity and able, sparking, or sputtering but causeful,
worded cogitation absorbed into the common stock of truth,
redundancies that stroke the egos of those on top who
gang together. Such a hang-jaw baffle, to tell her they are
bored with her on and on or ask her what she is on, when
she tells of harms. Such sanction and union to make her
non-being; the scandal to talk over plea and tell her shut up,
for she is off topic or merely morose. I have to remember,
they don’t stand alone because they don’t have the merit
for that, and know it, and need each other, and find each other.
The lie of this world. Sweet children are the fodder here.
They are the sticks for fire.
To know your worth, your merit even given as badge
by the bigger world- and no matter how far you go,
what you possess, they talk it upside down. I speak,
and they question my reason, so, my very right to speak,
when they do not want to hear. I speak, and when I talk
in way of uplift of those they stomp, they loud grins at
me, for putting value on what they commandeer is cipher.
I do have a bias, I do have a blind spot that is belief,
that is lived truth; I have my notion of what a woman
is. The body is not foremost to it. I believe in ones
who do not let go, who have feeling in them that flies
like gush of open veins, waterfalls, purge of coitus.
(Imagine sucker punch at just this instant of fly in worm-
hole, starry swim-hole, self-mastery, self-jettison- body
gaped and acute to feel to vanishing limit or redoubling
ad infinitum.) I believe in the fine nature that takes too
much and binges open; then they trial and needle. I
believe in woman who can teach and who has no out,
so gives up on words and spells it other, parallels her
point, shows it big like they admit, shows the kernel
in the small that feels to her like hail of shrapnel. (Nature
of her know, connect she makes, is apprehension, the
name given is sans-sense.) But they see no similitude
between what counts and what she would make count.
What she feels is of no account, and they will bang
this into her like nursery principal banged my head
on my mesh cot over and over when I could not sleep
and cried during naptime.
A reality that is not major does not matter, does
not matter, as real as it is, it belongs to a few only
and so it does not matter it does not matter nag it
does not matter. Show bedlam, go where they put
you when you tell what they cannot see. Go there
and show your issuance of blood, and let any straddling
eyes see what they cheer, the gouge and gush they clap.
Let me talk like twin speak or hermit who has built
a lexicon with his mirror image, let me go furthest from
where they want me. Let them compel me nothing, let
me lose the thread of commonality with those, let my
speech be invert. I cannot ease in the ruck. Oh it scares
me. They want my tongue sliced out, they want my mind
to stop. They want to say I am beneath any such effort if
I should out their intent in surprise preempt. They see me
as one to burn. They come together in pack so fast, they
are so ready to put down a one different, to eat her. What
they don’t recognize, they call gibberish. They may pay
for abstract pictures and inventions to hang on wall like animal
heads yet permit no elate logics that hover off of center in
the daily, flesh to flesh, push in way of train a one who talks
in different mode when rule of the game is the familiar,
teaching they got and drank.
They will not inch to you, you must shave and lose your
words, put them into the shapes and constrictions they only
will turn to. No rearrangement of common pattern will be
permissible, especially if you are woman: because there
are words ready for you if you give too much, talk, feel,
show too much. There are rules invoked if you let yourself
be a woman and try to offer this as teaching. Do not insist.
They will send you to the corner and call you mad for mimicry
of madness you protest. They will never see themselves
in what you show and tell. To the corner and shackle little
ankles, put lolli or dick in little mouth.
But I have to talk, to be of use. I have to talk, to them. They
are so many, they hold the reins, they laugh they laugh, they
have to be addressed, as if they can decipher, as if they ever
listen. What makes one go when the point of effort is so vapor?
Why not hide, wait out this life, leave the grass to them, not fight?
It is for them, it is theirs. Be I get loose, talk too much, act too
caw, all is forsaken, they show me they are boss, cage or kill me.
Only the word on the page. Or the word from mouth, facing
them as they jeer, as they yank on each other, rub one another
to a froth, while the pillory unrolls. Be the shame. Be it. Be
the sick bitch. Be the evil witch who begs for a good. The
timeless cages put to gird you, no matter to where you have
risen, no matter what you summon to show in front of doubt
and hate. The pack that does not want to be accountable
will burn you for using speech some docent dared to teach you,
speech that you then grew. Be the charred in the fire, be the
love on the cross. Give them that? To make no compromise,
to meet them nowhere near where they would drag you to with
rope around neck like donkey you do put so far above them.
Passion comes from a life lived and from what has been learnt
about what hurt is for shunt. They insist it comes from nowhere
but in between your ears. So that you cannot assert, that yes, my
nature, what I am, distinct from what you are, lets me know above you.
Kill the poet and reformer. Be the nag. The shame, face
unrecognizable with bulbous tumors that hang head low from
super heft, that children cry on seeing, no matter who is in,
behind the skin.
This poem is by Lianuska Gutierrez, a Ph.D. candidate in English and Gus T. Ridgel Fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
