No religion this, 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.