Battlefield
There is an island in my breast, all snowy
with whiteness, frosted in tons of billowy
coldness of pain, and hurt of a cold wind blowing
at the core of me, at the quick.
Life, it is not a trick
played by some childish, freckled God;
we are not princes hidden in the forms of frogs,
nor princesses; nor will I succumb
to ignore what feeling flowers in my thumb.
I have not come through the battles of tonight
in order that I might be thwarted
in my running blood—nor by the poison of some white
sterile injury that has parted
me from the fingers of life—
though you with your mealy-mouthed touches have done
grave injury to me, and to the sun
that bleats in my blood with veins of maleness, rushing
like a river of gentleness, flushing
through my deepest-swelling reaches, plucking
the very quick of my life into bud in its fun.
And I tell you the wounds that ripple
in my blood like cold tadpoles utterly
alien, unknowable foreigners, spies, cold-eyed
agents, betrayers of me—out to hurt what’s fluttering
most alive in me; all that is hurtable—
they are the pus of evil, muttering
their lies of death. Ice to freeze the simpler
straight feeling in my blood, and make it whimper.
