Partially submerged and demivierged
I emerged partially with writing on it.
There was an abrasion
where a suture would have been
had the words not sealed a fate
saying “you are a girl.”
You’re fine and you’re mine and you
arrived late and belated and your
head was your ahead of your time.
A body shot me through draggingly
like a sad affair got up longlingly.

The whole path was a message written in snow
with boot marks where a heart should have been.
I emerged with a pedigree and wrote
in a confessional mode that revealed my two
options from which I chose not to die erringly.
I chose carnelian as a secret manifestation
of what could not possibly be and I left
the confession mode floridly.

I recognized a plane of distinction
and a plane of despair that
cut me out in angles so the mode was spare.

I spent hours in pools of grace
and disgraced myself sparingly
as a way of saying what I could not write.
The mode was injunction. I grew fond of words
whose suspicions were conditioned against me
– like forthwith and henceforth – and I resolved
nonetheless that conclusions became me.

I lost track of time in a way that
encouraged fidelity. With that, I lost
sight of my heart joined with the ranks
of hearts clung foremost to my country
and second to my gender ideal.

I learned to laugh, I learned to bath, a simultaneity.
Water was the medium. I wrote in waves.
The whole path was a watery message in which
I learned to navigate like an intimate lost at sea.
The mode was automatism
and the surface of the water very clearly
represented the limit it was meant to surpass.
in the form of legs, arms and braids
that pointed only to one sex while my
arrows pointed in another. The other sex
was my other choice until something
sprung up in between. I came to accept
my breasts as one who looks upon them from a distance
bridgeable only in the imagination.
I worried my nipples into erection and
the rest would follow and the crevice of
departure cleaved with my return.
I played the game of leaving myself
while believing I was merely hidden.

Then came the break in my wishful
self fulfillment that I could understand
the materiality of my being.
The mode was collage. Object and texture
clung as in an embrace.
The correspondence was convincable
and under this plummage and swathage
I brought myself up
under the eyes and men and many.
The design was to fashion a cloak
the words were the path to that making.

There was a breach in the way
ideas might by born when birth was exhausted
as a metaphor. I had to realize my breach
exceeded my descriptive potential
and that what was the matter with me was that
I was matter and so was, to a degree, unmanageable.
The words that belonged to my birth
didn’t belong to me and I departed from that moment
continually to the accompanying impatience
of the accommodating few around me.
The mode was self-realization. The self
was a path written in containment.
And the soft cup advanced to the underwire
as a course of tumultuous reappraisal.

Then the litany presented itself
backed almost imperceptibly by
sturdy-armed institutions
so that initially its appearance  was
naturalized, magic. Then a slew
of options were rendered undiscoverable
by their collection and publication in a book
that forced itself upon the body intending
to give it quantifiable form. The I was
prized the award was writing inward and
pushing verse out as an accomplished sign.
The mode was instructional. The writing was
a path of avoidance written in refusals and coerced
by the treat of authenticity.

The acme of my physical disenfranchisement
was the discovery of my voice that appeared
to well up from inside me. The path was destruction
written in the helplessness committed to the bodies
of women. The disjuncture came in the form of
theory that I wore on the outside to gain
leverage from feelings. The mode was infamy.

Years of unrestrained attempts to pass
undetected were jettisonned then my posture
would improve. The imposture of allegiance
to similitude, to my left equals my right,
to two legs, to two arms, two braids
pointing equally and with
sovereign force to two lips, was derailed by
a drenched french text.

All the while I loved with a love
like love and then loved against that
with a vengeance. Like love likened
to a mode few could comprehend
but all were per force pushed into.
The mode was material as the body
modulated the means. The body a path
written over and becoming
swimmingly in the mode of the first
approach to its own ontology.

All the closures made open-ended
and I continued to exist unceasingly amidst
options now in perpetuity.
I chose continuity abridgement and belief.
The mode was serial and the next was
conceptualized with solidity, a stone path
built of words and fed and washed by water
so that passion propelled elementally.

All told I had fathered a child in the corner
of my mind and was resigned to bear this birth
unwittingly. This was a child of love
and a child of misrememberance
whom it made sense to betray as a metaphorical
vestige, an associational mode that bound me.
The mode was disarticulation and the child
dispersed on a path written in parts and read
as an emendation.

All the while I bore the consequences of unsurity,
of re-entry, as I departed with each word.
The mode was extrapolation and the line was a path
of realization that departed from flesh and hovered
toward machination. Impatience was a virtue
with breakages overcoming leakages.

What I meant to lose was
presentiment, embarrassment
What I promised to give was
immediate recrimination
What I expected to gain was
potential embarrassment
What I strove for was
given. What I vaunted
was gone. What I mastered
was experiential. What I ceded
was real and rare. Embarrassment.
What I intended to lose was embarrassment.

This waiting is awful. It’s worse
than that. It’s the worst, the awfulest.
This waiting is the worst, it’s horrible,
it’s worse than that, awfully so,
it’s terrible. This waiting is horrible.
It’s endless, it’s worse than that.
It’s horrible, terrible. Just awful.
Terrible, just terrible: endless,
simply endless and awful, horrible
and ghastly. The horriblest, awfulest
ghastliest. It’s worse than that.
It’s more horrible, more terrible.
This waiting is unbearable.
It’s awful. Just terrible. Horrible.
Ghastly. It’s worse than that.
It’s unbearable.

The past doesn’t limit the future; it seeks in the future its newly remade forms.