Cards of Identity

No religion here, no welcome-mat;

neither hymn nor prayer. No union

either: “Just pay your dues.”

“Now mingle. And have a beer.”

It’s rather a shoulder’s shrug, hard nails, frigid, cold, an unopened door,

the unequivocal send-off to an uninhabited moon: I, an outsider,

a player-piano on my own, homeless, beggared,

feelings blatantly shown.

 

So they have refused me entry

Poetry dot com,

has denied me permission

to take out subscriptions

to their magazines and their newsletters.

They say, go back to your consulting rooms,

where the fitting is appropriate, where your cards

of identity are more acceptable.

Thus, from this, to which I have, in all sincerity, converted,

I have been preemptively excommunicated.

Perhaps, though, even this is for the better:

that if I were joined to this esoteric coterie,

if I accept the implications of its requirements, its neo-baptismal immersions;

then lungs, brain, heart, every visceral iota

would fill, and filled, would sink

oceanicly, into a churn of conjunctions and agitated adjectives, caught in a tide

of writhing rhythmic connections;

would be of myself a sacrifice in that encompassing,

a “crucifixion”,

the stretch from which there’s no returning.

 

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