Stone

I dreamed once of a little child
Whose name was that of stone,
And for all I’ve ever felt alive
That child has felt alone.
We’ve wandered long, two specters twinned
Up to the gates of hell,
But for all our silent, ghostly looks,
I could never really tell
If that child followed in my wake,
A lonely phantom saint,
Or whether it was I who trailed,
Sullen, bruised,
likely to faint.

I get the feeling he has walked
Much farther yet than I,
Yet wander on I know he must —
Little longing yet to die.
So let us go then he and I
Into that depth of place
That stops as suddenly as a fall
In his ghastly childish face.

©K Paige Medina 28 June 2017

Oil

I want to be the man who rescues the dogs of the desert,
but I am not.
I am the desert, rustling drily beneath an unforgiving sun,
that I also am,
punisher of cracked seeds, the beating heat of a purgatory
I cultivated for myself.
But I am also the dogs, running, tumbling,
children trapped in the spiny grasp of an unkind world,
but the world is me
and I am dry
and I am sweat
and I am asphyxiating on the calcified fossils of unsaid words
dipped, acidic, into poisons I feed myself,
where the roots of my soul cling desperately to
aquifers full of toxic, molten, gangrene sunlight.
Tarantino sunlight.
The sunlight that brings death in a bride–
a poached kind of brightness that
bleaches in nuclear fallout the bones of dogs
unrescued.
I want to be that beautiful savior,
but I am the unsaved and the desert,
bearing yellow teeth,
oozing with the oil slick hatred that grows,
abundant
in the dry, buzzard air.

©K Paige Medina 25 May 2017

Orlando

The darkness of a keening world,
no longer bared to light–
the untipped scales of one man’s hate
prowling through the night.
We reach for answers like a shield
that blocks us from the truth
that wafts away like gunsmoke or
the impermanence of youth.
The nights we sought to quell the sound
of being all alone
were shattered into violence
the minute we found home.

By morning light we heard the news,
awoken into fear
by bitter voices importuning
how could this happen here?
These others, fallen shells of hope,
these others who have sinned,
we kept them far away from us,
the self-righteous, till the end.

Nostalgic for the silence of
indifference or fear,
no glooming peace this morning brings,
no peace at all, for we’re
the judges and the jury
for the ones we left to die
collective in their plaintive call,
the hardest question—“why?”

Why did we leave them in the night,
these vibrant castaways
to suffer judgment all their lives
until one violent man’s choice sways
the opinions of the populace
into graceful mourning sounds
as if we held them close to us,
as if we’d ever found
a reason to see in them
some of our humanity–
no, now it is our turn to cry,
“why’d you take them away from me?”

We’ve torn ourselves asunder
trying to pronounce the blame,
but truth is we’re all culprits
in a crime we’ve yet to name,
that states we’ll sit in silence
through intolerance and bigotry
until we feel absolved through
some new mass tragedy.

Awaken into struggle
do not fear your life’s true pain,
Offer up your sacrifice of loss,
Don’t let it happen again.

[6/13/16]
© K Paige Medina