The night I was torn from the pages of their Bible
and burned alive,
my ashes came down like snow,
and a girl who had never seen my face
saw me falling from the sky,
and laid down on her back to make an angel
in the powder of my bones.
From heaven, I watched her,
‘though my eyes were still flame,
and my ribs were still blue.
"They didn’t win," I whispered
as her arms built my wings.
They didn’t win.
Look at that moon;
it is a pebble in my hand.
Tonight, I could skip it across that fog-drunk sea
to the lashes accordion in the night,
and all they know of hate
is that it couldn’t beat the love out of me,
that when they dropped me to the grave,
I fell like a bucket in to a well
and came up full;
carving my lover’s name in to the skin of a weeping willow
that had spent its entire life laughing at the rain.
Hold me like a lantern;
staircase my spine.
When they bring the children to my funeral
to scream fàggot at my dust,
tell them
I was born in to their casket
but I wouldn’t pull the splinters from my heart
any more than Christ
would’ve pulled the thorns from his crimson head.
They can come a thousand times
with their burning match
and their gasoline;
with their hungry laws
and their empty mouths
full of prayers
to that God that greeted me at his gates
with his throat full of trumpets
and his tears full of shame,
as his trembling palms
collected the cinder of his children’s crime.
I know what Holy is.
I know that the soul is shaped like a bowl.
I know the lies we try to fill it with,
and we spill too often the orchards inside,
but my lover’s shoes were tied with guitar strings
and when I walked beside
there was a silo in my chest;
there was a field full of sun;
there was a river full of gold
that we left
to pick our sweet hearts from the trees
that kept uprooting tombstones
so the names of the dead
would crumble in to poems.
Write me down like this:
say my ashes never made the news;
say the jury was full of shotguns,
and say the snow that fell on the tip of your tongue
refused to melt away.
Say this:
to the kids hiding their heart beats
from their father’s fists
I planted the garden of my kiss;
I opened the night with my teeth;
I loved so hard that when they pressed their ear to the track,
the train they hear coming will still be my chest -
a rumbling harpoon; a sky they can not bury.
Look at that moon
I am a pebble in her hand;
a harmonica held to the mouth of the river where
nothing
ever
burns.
musicure
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