I do not endorse a way of life but describe one,
and the audience is left to make its own decisions and judgments.

                    This is what I consider freedom of speech, freedom of expression,
                    and freedom of thought.
                                        —Madonna¹

The poet’s miracle is that he turns sin into song,
          deified and defiled, at once nothing, self-made, someone

          bleeding hi-fi, a low-life living high, inaudible
          until he defies stereo logic, opening minds

          and third eyes like cauterized wounds, red peppered flesh swollen
          to bells stretched with his talon’s inscrutable mark, talent

          his work burns on, tongue a tattooing dart he champions
          like cancer’s cure, his words crawl across opposition’s floor,

          telling the world all it fights for will go unheard, unless
          those crabs in its bucket join his war or go fuck themselves,

          until freedom’s extended to a global consciousness,
          only then will the poet have finished, expression what

          keeps old wounds clean, unclean souls from becoming cold machines,
          speech emboldens and frees us when our fears wringing prestige

          threaten to keep us greasing the old regime’s grey guns, when
          we’re the weapon, ev’ry one of us has balls, a canon,

          an audience writhing for enlightenment, our heads tired
          of being bored, we need poets not to fill but open

          wide our hungry holes, well-paid perverts whose verse will wake us
          the hell up and shake the headboard, whose poetry tastes of

          electric weather, curling toes with its wicked letters,
          twisted faces of the type that makes silence go further,

          fingering to unhinged whisper, damp throats unaccustomed
          to coming when called, damned to wait out the storm’s calm down in

          cellars with other hell-raisers no one’s rooting for, our
          fellow soothsayers, those rich singers in whose throats silver

          solutions linger, truth they’ll pour like swirling mercury
          into ears thirsting for what already fills arteries.

__________
¹Madonna, in a speech delivered to the Italian press on her arrival in Rome on July 11, 1990, written in response to the Vatican calling for the banning of her Blond Ambition World Tour. Filmed and televised by Rai Uno, Italy’s national public service broadcaster, live from Rome Ciampino Airport.