I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

"Live in the layers,

not on the litter."

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back

to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low

in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house

but what came was much stranger, a liquidity

moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog

slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still

green in the morning’s shade. I watched her

munch and stand on her haunches taking such

pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed

delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts

on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,

as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled

spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,

I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes

me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine

when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,

and she is doing what she can to survive.

Go live with yourself after what you didn’t do.

Go and be left behind. Pre-package

                              your defense, tell yourself

                                                      you were doing

             your oath, guarding the futility of

            

                   your corrupted good,

              discerning the currency of some.

                                   As if them over all else.

                                         Over us.

                                    Above God and Spirit.

                                        

                          You over me, you think.

This is no shelter in justice not sheltering with

enclosure of soft iron a sheltering of injustices

into an inferno flooding of your crimes committed

and sheltered by most culprit of them all.

                      These nesting days come

outward springs of truth,

                    dismantle the old structures,

their impulse for colony—I am done

                                                    with it, the likes of you.

To perpetrate.

To perpetrate lack of closure, smolders of unrest.

To perpetrate long days alone, centuries gone deprived.

                             To be complicit in adding to the

                   perpetration of power on a neck,

                            there and shamed,

                             court of ancestors to disgrace

              you, seeing and to have done nothing.

Think you can be like them.

Work like them.

Talk like them.

Never truly to be accepted,

                                            always a pawn.