This was written for Read Write Poem’s NaPoWriMo#3: Three in a Row. I took the “trinity” theme a little loosely and wrote this. Enjoy.

-Nicole

———————————————————-

The trinity of you, me, and God
cannot stand on the head of a pin. We
cannot split hairs, dividing truth from
truth – because this one thing is truth,
the fact that

one man’s God

is another man’s devil. It has to
do with faces – I wear one, you
wear another, and we change masks
every lifetime and century. But
it also has to do with

mirrors. Look into one sometime,
and tell me

if you don’t see the wicked strains
of dichotomies digging too-soon wrinkles
like World War II trenches into your
face, pursing curses into your lips,
and tossing empty dogma face first into
your mouth until you hurl it back
out again in a stilted rhythm keeping
perfect time with the pleasant sounds of
your own personal whipping boy being
thrashed and bled to death inside your
brain. And you ask me if

I

am insane
for not believing the same strains
of Holy Writ-cum-philosophy
that you do.

And before you think that I shake my
fist indiscriminately and only at things wrapped
in Jesus cloth and speaking in tongues, then
consider this: I cannot stand to see women
commanded to lose the desire from between
their legs or to sing muted songs and suffocate
inside black cocoons, or to hear the blood-steeped
howls of upper-caste jeweled Kalis as they dance
on the back of browner Shivas. And I speak
this because I’ve felt the

lashes of damnation

upon my own skin because the music of
finer and blood-bone worlds
calls me to dance and pound the borders
of Africa into the floor with my feet

(it used to wear the skins of blue notes
and sorrowed molasses-dripping voices
begging their souls back into their bodies –
then it spoke the language of rock and roll)

and I refuse to bleed anymore. So call me

wicked

if you must, but I wonder:

what will you do if
the face you see when you
cross the translucent gossamer veil
from life to afterlife

does not match the one
implanted by books of old
and words of fire
into your mind?

Written 4/6/09
© 2009 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!