A Poem Warranted in Response to the Passing of Proposition 8 and Amendment 2
Or
The Zoo

I’ve tried to see it your way
I’ve tried to feel what you say
comes naturally,
       purely,
          unabatedly.
But I cannot abide by myself
like an unopened letter on a shelf,
that was meant to be read lines ago
And now has been peeled rind by indigo.

Love is beyond sex or color.
It is beyond the faith of our mothers.
There is no natural speed.
It can seep — ivy on a wall
until you wake one morning — to see
you cannot see.
Or it will blight you as suddenly
as the flight of sparrows
from a tree.

I do not claim to know it.
Only this: it makes the words of poets that I read
smell and sound like the loss you have made me grieve.

It is not as you think.
It is not the want of movie screens and Halloween
that I seek to feed.
But the look of the shark and the canary,
browning polar bears in January,
the shudder dipped feathers of herons,
the pursed lips of lions
and the ape that meets my stare
through the glass
that I want freed.

I do not claim to it.
Only this: At it is "natural" for you to
build walls I cannot breach,
It is as fieray for me to scale
the barbed fence and preach.

It is not what you think.
It is not because I am seventeen, or
twenty-two, or forty-five and I believe
in the new nude.
It is because I am the pigment, the red, the orange
that blossoms in fall; I was always there
Except now, I cannot wait
through the interlude.

Let the isms be prisons
But let the lovers be lovers
Let the colors be colors
To be beamed and envisioned
Through everlasting clear prisms
of the risen, the vision, the definition
Through the march on streets paved
with the glory, the hope, and the saved,
Let us walk together to those days
Not as foes, not as distance, but as blood,
as ties —
    ruseless
       ruthless
          truth.