I wasn’t born with a clenched fist.
When I was a child
dandelions caught my eye
more than toy trucks or tin soldiers.
But dandelions die with a squirt of Round-Up
and the trucks and soldiers
wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Somewhere
on some scrap of paper
at the bottom of a trash can
I saw the sketch of a face.
It looked back at me from behind pencil scribbles
like the face I see in the mirror
but it was sculpted in the smooth strokes of an artist
without the blotches and erasures
that scar the canvas of my own body.
The eyes were clear as the face of a still pond
but still alive with tadpoles
wiggling just under the surface.
The skin around the eyes wasn’t puffy
because it slept in a straw bale house
next to the community center
where the voices of children chattered like chipmunks
and mixed with the smell of chopped vegetables
spiced by a moonlit circle
gathered to breathe a shared vision
into the houses and forests
of the hills and valleys.
The smile on the face tasted like fresh dates
because the upturned lips had been kissed
by the mouth of a woman
or a man
who held the face’s hand
without crushing any fingers
or letting go when someone else
cradled the other palm.
It was a nice sketch
but somebody crumpled it up
and threw it in the circular file cabinet
to rot with slimy black banana peels
and a dog-eared copy of Thomas More’s Utopia.
The baby who was born with nothing more to cry about than birth
the boy who picked dandelions in the tall grass
the man who lives in community centers and forests
and the arms of lovers
is rotting on a crumpled piece of paper
at the bottom of a trash can.
I could almost hear the sound of the wind
rustling through the leaves of an oak-tree-to-be
whispering my name
when all of the sudden
somebody plucked the acorn out of the grass
and sold it to Wal-Mart for a quarter.
I was snatched out of the earth
before I was even born.
And even if I’d sprouted somehow,
what good is an oak tree
in the middle of a desert?
The tree of life is stillborn;
the soil of the forest
runs through my hands
like a damp and heavy sand
moistened only by blood.
So what was left for me to do?
I clenched my fist.
I dug myself an unmarked grave
and buried myself in the womb of the earth
like a dry old skeleton
with hands clasped in prayer
waiting to be reborn.
And I was!
I dug my way back to the surface
clawing past jagged rocks and clumps of dirt
until the sun shone down on me
coupling with the earth below
to give birth to a jungle of rainbows
so colorful that I could taste them.
I breathed the scent of morning dew
and the hues of the soil and sky
into my newborn lungs.
I felt my heartbeat
pulsing through the colors all around me
and heard the sound of the wind in the trees
whispering in my chest.
But I also saw the jagged outline
of skyscrapers and earth movers
like a forest of cut glass
bearing the puke green fruits of capitalism
to pump formaldehyde into the bodies of the walking dead
and I knew that each breath of sage that I drew
each pulse of sunshine that pounded in my chest
each flex of my snakelike muscles
each turn of my mind’s twirling tongue
drew me onward to the one place
the good place, no place,
the place that drew breath into my twitching corpse
and opened my blinded eyes
so that I could see it in the distance
and crawl, walk, run, fly
toward a sketch
of a world where the dead can lay down their bones
because they’ve tasted more
than blood-choked sands of an asphalt graveyard.
This is how I came to breathe revolution
like a fish breathes water and a bird breathes air.
I live to shatter the jagged forest of twisted towering glass
that slit my newborn wrists while I was still in the cradle
but even more, I draw in this mountainous breath
so that my exhale will nourish the tender acorn
that’s hiding in the corner of some parking lot
hoping to find a crack in the soil
to lay down the roots
of a new forest.
Utopia is now.
Let it fill your body with trembling breath
let it open your eyes with quaking colors
let it pound in your chest like a thousand claps of thunder
or you are already a decapitated corpse
rotting on the road to nowhere.