A Time

I have watched my body do things it has not wanted
But has needed, venturing with me into sickness

And madness, darkness and despair with violent love
And falsity, beating its way into minds through too-hard logic

Guising itself as care and God, victim and misjudged,
Holding me at a distance, carefree, careless, unable

To watch in intoxication with myself and other
Tormentors, participating in my own epiphenomenal child’s play

With a word lurking now: confession—used pathetically
As a scapegoat around a veiled and cowardly vocabulary, a pitiful cry

From the dead of night, the worst of me and my body
Not remembering (it has allowed me

A continued distance)——yours

Not needing deliverance to be healthily beat
And rid; for we are held safely in turmoil—and we must

See it as reasoned: for the predetermined sinners—sinned—
To disappear. For all our dirty bodies to be worth something.