Without
.
A country lawn immaculately pruned,
extracted of weeds and anthills and the dead bodies
of its once small inhabitants.
It is nourishing to sing. Some
confuse music with water, resist the stark call
of your harsh features and quiet undertones of control.
Some don’t like to sit on lawns, would rather be on
a compost heap, digging for eggshells or even half a fruit.
Some need to dance when they should be standing still,
unable to earn medals or be garlanded with
authority’s praise. Tadpoles in a bitter pond –
sperm that cannot grow feet or claim a grown-up form.
They flush out of your system. And every flight they attempt
is arrested by you, you who are surface smooth with smiles,
but underneath, you are stretched cold rubber,
cracking like those lines framing your chin,
or like a flame to a tree,
you crack moist-with-life digits into splinters.
You should let the mad-ones go to India,
trace a path up Tibetan mountains.
You should be pleased to see them go, away
from your boarding school,
not there to tug your pierced ears or point out
your visceral smothering of the gentle dreamers.
They will go anyway.
They will stand in front. Not because they want to
but because they are not soldiers like that,
forming their destinies
in boxes. You can stay in corridors, make trenches
by pacing the patterns
of your congealed thoughts. You can be anyone
you want.
.
.
Copyright © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst
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.
First published in “The Foliate Oak Literary Magazine”, 2012
.