Hail to the Breaking Point
Hail to the breaking point and
Hail to the building point, my friends.
Hail to where it ends, and again, always, first and last,
In the waking rejoin – Hail to where it begins.
Up the godawful trans punks,
Raise a cup of hot coffee in hands that rattle and funk –
Raise it to the black-out white-out warrior freakout,
The way it picks you up and shakes you,
Leaves no reserves and takes you,
The balls-out point that breaks you – hail!
To the breaking point, the anointing ache, the fight,
The broken shot glass in the street,
The holy smoke and gas billowing from your stomping feet,
The stoking red and blue lights that whirl
That hurl the sandblast clarity to shimmer on the pavement like heat – hail!
To the surrender, to the possession
By the gods of fire and war,
To the holy fission in your plucked-string core that fills you bloodthirsty,
Fills you to bursting here, and on the dance floor,
As their vessels, as their hands, in their name,
Under the breakers and dreaming of the sands of an unreachable shore –
Surrender, surrender, burn and crash and
Leave not even an ember – not even ash.
Hail to the riot and the smashed cruiser windshields,
the flowering bruise and towering cry – it ends with us – it ends tonight.
Hail to the light of the precincts in flames
And the names of the murdered that you recite
Into the mouthpiece of an NYPD long-range acoustic device:
Demarkes Stansberry, Keyonna Blakeney,
Mercedes Successful, Brandi Bledsoe,
Quartney Davia Dawsonn-Yochum,
Jazz Alford, Noonie Norwood,
Reecey Walker, Kayden Clarke,
Kendarie/Kandicee Johnson,
We will push back the dawn
For as long as this endless list goes on.
Hail to the breaking point.
Hail to the building point,
The earthshipbuilding counterpoint.
Hail to another cup of coffee,
Passed from hand to hand softly around the circle in our great hall,
Quiet words, open silences, time enough to breathe it in and say it all.
Hail to the pile of quilts, to what we build, to what we rebuild,
To the gild of sunlight on the nuclear frost
We can see through the window, but here on the pillow
Stretching branches of the kind of tree that clings on the cliffside, my dears,
The tree the blossoms in precarity.
Our squat wood stove with its creaky lid,
Hail to your hands on my hands as we knead the dough for a loaf of bread because oh,
Hail to the building point.
Hail to the building point, the silver wellpoint,
The old tools, the new tools, the semiprecious jewels of baby fruits,
Tucked under leaves and just starting to wake up
As we check the hoses on our gray water setup.
Hail to our scars, the place
Where my eyebrow didn’t grow back,
Hail to our flashbacks, our comebacks, our wolf pack,
To the coffee dashed in the sneer of a cop and hail!
To the coffee poured around our firelit table. Hail!
To the full stop and hail!
To the pause, the pause as we’re able. Hail!
To the armlinked screaming chorus and hail!
To singing until we’re flowing and overflowing and hoarse and hail!
To the tenderness of unreserved force and hail!
To the afterglow that will restore us and hail!
Hail to next year in the forest.