THE BLEEDING MASK

(after recollecting the hell of being an abandoned, very ugly child)


DIG DEEP, MOCKINGWORDS.
Burrow under my skin and sting your songs,
Joke me, until there ring again in my ears
bells that foxed me in the schoolyard hunt.
(When children played I was the game
and orphan I could not hide or run to home
away from the chalked and crayoned drawings
of my ill-bred Neanderthal skull,
profusely signed with the first two letters of happiness.)



Dig, selfmockingbard.
Gouge out all the lumped malignant humor
that gagged me when the body's racial fever
first raged in my blood-bedazzled I.
(The first she-flesh I fumbled into
after my birth's long journey into my own
was aged in foolish ways and found funny
the terror of my quick-spilling need to trust
in her and thrust in her myself from boy to man.)



Trace the mocking barbs
that bait my heart on acid-witted shafts,
and know how the deepest wounds went through to light,
sculpting my scars into poetry.
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