The Way It Looks

Oh your friends call you Lily Faloma

but that's not the way that you are

It's too much of a gentle misnomer

for a shooting star

                                                 --Al Stewart

It's not the way it looks

the moon in the sky

your face in the mirror

the thing that was done or not done. 

It's not the way it looks

the moon, lonesome rock out in space

ask the fascinated tide

about the gravity of lit soul

It's not the way it looks

your face in the mirror so lined

ask the devils, those angels that free you

from a birdcage of bones 

The mirror limits vison

the moon limits sense

and everything you are or are not

will, in time, incandesce. 

____________

This song has been on my mind for days now. The woman he's singing about reminds me of me.

Al Stewart Song On the Radio

 

A Peculiar Blindness

"If I were blind, would you be my eyes?" --Todd Rundgren "Pretending To Care"

It's a peculiar blindness
so many of us have. 

There you are, little bug, looking for a place to land
never giving much thought to how you came so far.

That's why a breeze brought you me.
You think you are small, unremarkable,

but I can see your big glorious wings
spread out like an exclamation

right behind you,
in fabulous display,
plain as day.
______

for Wednesday Muse "butterflies."

Constellation In Glass

I said, "I have the sea inside a glass flower vase.
I have the stars on a necklace string, leather and light."

You said, "Oh, for the blue behind the moon;
the rain that never rains enough--
the silence--the ivory key--the night."

The etched leaves on the face of the flower vase
tell about your fingers on my skin.

And the necklace? Its silver clasp 
opens only once--releasing 
the lonely orderly stars...again.
_______

 

Murder Because (for Leelah Alcorn)

Murder because God is not a bludgeon to be used against your own children.
Murder because you couldn't stand the truth.
Murder because destroying a soul in the name of God is an obscene lie.
Murder because everywhere 
everywhere
everywhere
to be seen as feminine is to be seen as less.

Murder because you hammered nails through her wings and called it a cross.
Murder every time you called her "he".
Murder every time you used the name she knew was not hers,
and drove the despair in a little deeper every time you did.

Murder because of the rape of spirit that is conversion therapy.
Murder because you stuffed God's mouth full of your own lies.
Murder because this must not happen again.
Murder because you drove the sanctimonious unstoppable truck
that she stepped in front of and was smashed by dogma dressed up as Jesus. 

Murder again and again even after she's dead, through the things you say.
Murder because there is no bible anywhere that says it is better to bury your children
than to love them for who they really are.
Cisgendered, transgendered, genderqueer, gay, bi, or straight,
America's children are talking; don't let God be the only one who listens.
________

On December 28th, 2014,  sixteen year old Leelah (born Joshua) Alcorn killed herself by stepping in front of a truck. She did this after having told her parents that she was transgendered; their response was to declare her truth "a phase" and to send her to Christian conversion therapy. Feeling isolated and hopeless, she decided that ending her life was her only option. Even after her death, her parents spoke of their "unconditional love" for their "son." 

 

Old Fashioned

I'm an old-fashioned girl.
When I go down through the reeds, 
making my skirts muddy,
my high-button shoes neatly together on the grass nearby,

birds extinct for years except as specimens
flock to me, calling.
Butterflies and moths in all peculiar colors
appear once again,

and I speak to them in the lost language
of former summers.
Here, I am a girl again, with a different name
but the same soul.

I'm an old-timey girl, daydreaming beneath the willows.
This morning, I collected the hens' eggs,
and holding them in my hand, the white shells made me think
of snowdrops, and writing paper, and June clouds.

No one will ever join me here, I realize.
I am a firefly girl inside the jar of my body,
graced with an afternoon's worth of air, but floating out,
always out,

until, by bullfrog dark, I will be only a curiosity, 
like my birds, the butterflies and moths,
barely seen by a child leaning in her upstairs window not far away,
and she will wonder at what she seems to see,

a light on the water, there and then vanishing,
like her own summer days, though she doesn't know it yet.
______

May 28, 1908 Life magazine cover illustrated by Coles Phillips

For you, love

For you, love,
I have made my whole body a morning.
Birds rise from me,
a murder of crows gone soft as black lace
and as light as the tender intentions of my fingertips.

For you, love,
I know the wait has been long.
I know that you are a tangled garden
with a dark rose at its heart,
so I have spun a cocoon
and sleep next to you,
blessing the stem, your body, which called me.

For you, love,
I have clothed each clock with filament and incense.
Never mind them honey,
nor the things that seem to keep us apart--
you think you are waiting, but you are already arrived
In the shelter of my new wet display--
the one I bore and wear
always and only
for you, love.
___________

for magpie tales #89