coming back to poetry (or, trans—?)
I guess I’ve been androgynous (in that ugly way) all my days, I didn’t know. No one said Know it. But I mowed my green lawns well ashamed: my buoyant, gay labor, like a crow flies, sweated for future. It made my Body swell not at all, timid buddings no Roses & slowly; so I felt insufficiently male. So I craved, swell Like ants in a colony, for more: “Trans— ?” So the cheeky happiness made Like late mail, barely, carrying its special memos Out to anyone, but few received. All my friendships; all my family, so half received me and I was like an anthill scattering. But what is so Sexual about wanting swell scatter? Or different treatments? Or chores? that old Victorian femme- only Faint way I, no Female, could use Faint excusing me from lawn’s hell? No Heaven fell, but It was just Childish thinking; (Unfair?) Now I sit, crow- symbolic, still, thirty, Proto to a kind of Second Puberty, trapped, not yet in gender’s manual traffic, But in my own poem. This is progress. Just to be writing again any one poem. But I was saying something about fire— fire ants, rage? How they do their cryptic, patient work in spiraled pairings.
