Waxing poetic on thoughts, theory & the times
“It’s a man’s world,”
they say,
But someone still
Needs to teach
The little ones,
Gender irrelevant,
How to do,
To survive,
To get by,
When a “man” is gone,
Not present,
Never present,
Or passed on;
What of little girls never taught
To change a tire;
Or mow the lawn?
We teach her
To understand dependence,
Believe it,
Then rip off the illusion
With age;
Man, woman
Mortality is the great equalizer,
Teach the little ones, all:
How.
Here I am,
Freer than I can remember being
In a long while,
All these fresh, glistening feelings
Settle in upon me:
Emotions, sensations,
needs, desires;
Things I’ve pushed away
For so long,
Too long
Aspects of being,
Delights of life that I have denied myself
Become now apparent glittering possibilities,
Present reminders
of my sensitive, seductive self;
Pieces I shuttered for safe keeping
For too long,
But never gone
Only held;
Rising, here and now
Transformed
Into a new manifestation;
a Goddess,
Refined with time and pressure
Ready too for her due from life,
In more than the hefty weight of the world,
But in the ripe exquisite beauty and pleasure of its bearings,
Forged and fiery,
with light of the sun she gleams,
A diamond emerged from the rough.
My body
Is my own.
I need not explain why
I have said “No”
To your assertions on it.
It is my own;
it is my only.
My emotions too
Are my own.
And they are valid.
“Calm down!”
“What’s your problem?”
“Hysteria!”
“Women!”
–It’s all the same misogynistic logic;
Lies fed generation to generation
to ignore reality
of the Other, of the feminine.
Poke a sleeping dog
–A bitch,
And see how many times that works,
Before you see
the teeth.
She of Letters 