They hand you a box
Four neat lines joined at supremely perfect right angles
Your body, rounded at the edges, pliable, more flesh than muscle
Squeezing yourself into shape you triumph, look you say, I fit
Skin compacted into nothingness
Cells harnessed to behave
One day, unexpectedly you spill out
Over the edges, across the lines
Mass dictating it’s rules
look they say, what happened
Such perfection you echoed
Body in brazen boldness refusing to contain
Now, what boxes will hold your audacious mess
For each time you got poured into jars
In measures to pertain
Mutinous membranes pushed roughly through surfaces
An ensuing rousing roar to reframe
What will they make of you today
Overflowing at the rim, excess at the edges
Your realization of self not suiting their definition of you
You, shapeless, formless, celestial outpour
Were not meant for frame, or be framed
Thus, a ghazal harnessed is tamed, held back by rhyme and refrain
You, a free verse runs wild on terrain
Every picture has an architecture
Of lines to hold narratives
A construct for: hey I am here, this is now, see me
Found self salvaged from the rain
Dripping water on the rug
I walked long and hard, away from scaffolded umbrellas, not to have structural systemas of power extol the virtues of my supposed soul
I tell you, wet that Persian rug
Stain it with the memories of those long nights
Spent tasting the unsaid
Then pray, bent over, facing God
Unity is a strange family of hushed uncomfortable truths
A hot iron tyrannically smoothes every anomaly into placid coherence
We prefer friendly banter here
Porcelain cups and butter biscuits
Silver cups and laced rum
What of you? Too full of emotion
Too much analysis
Too dusty coal for white pearls
A life of lived expectation is a waste of time
Transgress to celebrate the momentous occasion of being here and now
Without the need to be seen or heard
Be
Approval, like clothespins, hanging you to dry
Art is not pictures with a few lines
Van Gogh meshed blobs of vividness, not a single border between colors
Become those terraces in Paris
Those swirly clouds
That speck of blue
A thousand words will be said
To hem the edges of what they think is you
A whisper from the abyss
Unfettered feather, morning pigment, a moment awaits, answer me by being unapologetically you.
(written in a fevered frenzy for the man I love)
