fifteen.

The things they don't know
frighten me. Make me wonder how
I ever managed to survive
before I knew the truths
that I love.
Chemistry—the way the elements slot together
into molecules, the variations of
heat and substance and the state of
everything everywhere. Malleability, the shapes
were are and the shapes we can be
hammered to fill. That fireworks
and bombs
are points on a spectrum. And government—those
rights which are theirs, inalienable, distinct,
the rules that give space to breathe and
boundaries to cross, the poetry of the amendments
and the flow of the process,
the periodic tables of
change. The hooks and
barbs that hold cases into precedent, that demonstrate
the law itself as malleable, mutable, magic.
History—Beat poetry, and the baby boom,
all those phrases that birthed the music
they do know, the images on
their television screens. I drew patterns—
the War brought the poets, who
tried to bring the physical into language, to
create elemental verse, to create themselves
unprecedented.
To push the edges of the
acceptable, even if it led to trials.
Frustrated, I gave
them Howl and hoped, maybe,
for a spark to flare, for a moment to
open, for a reshaping.