A letter to the platinum-hearted,
torn open, exposing art’s hardest truth
to your indifferent hordes, in which its
author implores the literate of the
world to read, to see that all is a lie
and to consider it

fair warning that more will be said of what
others wouldn’t, that this is a flaming
revelation impudent and prudent,
at once subduing them, and stirring to
movement, all blind souls who feel the volt of
my tongue’s dread current

as its verse jolts through them—to my sisters
and brethren in collusion, hopefully
penning a similar, if not the same,
chaos to uproot suited men sated
by their antiquated -isms, to you to
whom all truth has been

denied, its many applications since
declined, because you languish and suffer
as I have, my anguish now offers to
prove what you’ve felt pornographically
is yet a telegraphy of visions
trespassing Fascist

morality’s kohl-laden eyes, heavy
lids closing in on society’s slick
buttered thighs, since in every person’s
transgression reclines an angel prostrate
in vigil, praying for lowly mortals
to contemplate and

comprehend we’re all holy, tangled in
one net, truly capable yet always
unable to free our Selves, throw it off,
unearth, and follow the cable that, like
a nerve hewn from one’s gums, dangles God’s shark
tooth in front of us,

biting down and sinking into what’s pure,
rotten words silence turns to solid truth,
hollowing out the exhumed fossils of
doubt fueling our shouts—crying aloud as
we battle damsels whose constant distress
convinces us we

had all better soon redress old wounds and
salt our hearts, tasting not heroism but
hot circumspection, wrecking to cool ash
patriotism, patriarchy, and their
payment systems, words demon-etizing
wisdom, bleeding from

freezing windpipes gushing voices speaking,
beseeching victims to rise against him:
that self-inflating impersonation,
the all-great, the hate-perpetuating
creator-deity compromising
all his theistic

integrity to pander to human
homogeneity, off wooing them
softly, saying, ‘We are all the same,’ when
it’s this demagogue’s, ‘Love everyone’
song diluting them, depriving them of
the pressing fact that

difference, not deference, raises up
the lowly and shows the Universe how
multiplicative a swollen, droning
multitude of long-ignored, uni(n)formed
non-believers is—shunning them, banning
us, serves only to

confirm that, like the masses, authors are
simultaneously slaves hustling an
ancient cycle of formulaic dance,
a performance, a painted way of life
irreconcilably burdensome, and
sentient forces

capable of so-much-more-than-this, such
that insubordinates and poems can,
and do, and shall still, form moulds from which to
break, taking from our taskmaster all of
that strange magic he poured into our veins,
running out of it,

running from patient obeisance, running
off, running our mouths, undermining his
coal-black name to make ones for our damned Selves,
digging deep who we are, washing off his
shame—mining a bomb to throw down at his
feet as we throw down

his crown and become freed kings, taking up
(t)his hand and playing gardeners as we
play our spades, declaring codependence
on none other, and no thing, than that same
magic flooding our gilded arteries,
plating in gold all

that we make, since artists and their gawking
audiences mirror what they create,
I compel you never again to let
a dealer determine your fate, to cut
through his bullshit, to cut the deck, and bet
only what you make.