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shit; when disdain
    mounts you on a colored toothpick
    like a smoked clam; when your friends misunderstand
    your books and your enemies
    understand them far too well;
    when you lie alone on the sharp stones of unspoken
    retorts fallen in the ravine of garrulous night
    in the canyon of echoes where the dead
    whisper reproaches; when you are empty of words,
    a worm in your own apple,
    ignore, ignore that death murmuring at your ear
    like a lover far too pretty for you, whose attentions
    flatter you, and how people will talk,
    you will show them yet if you
    but turn your head. Ignore those soft
    shapes from the stone cold fog
    welling from the back of the throat.
    He is not pretty, that boy, only well
    advertised. Give your enemies nothing.
    Let our tears freeze to stones
    we can throw from catapults.
    Death is their mercenary, their agent.
    He seduces you for hire.
    After your death he will pander
    your books and explain you.
    I know we can’t make promises.
    Every work pushed out through the jagged
    bottleneck sewer of the industry
    is a defeat, mutilated before it’s born.
    My faucets drip at night too. I wake
    tired. From the ceiling over my bed
    troubles spin down on growing threads.
    Only promise if you do get too weary,
    take a bank president to lunch,
    take a Rockefeller with you. Write
    your own epitaph and say it loud.
    This life is a war we are not yet
    winning for our daughters’ children.
    Don’t do your enemies’ work for them.
    Finish your own.

     THE LUNAR CYCLE

     The moon is always female
    The moon is always female and so
    am I although often in this vale
    of razorblades I have wished I could
    put on and take off my sex like a dress
    and why not? Do men wear their sex
    always? The priest, the doctor, the teacher
    all tell us they come to their professions
    neuter as clams and the truth is
    when I work I am pure as an angel
    tiger and clear is my eye and hot
    my brain and silent all the whining
    grunting piglets of the appetites.
    For we were priests to the goddesses
    to whom were fashioned the first altars
    of clumsy stone on stone and leaping animal
    in the wombdark caves, long before men
    put on skirts and masks to scare babies.
    For we were healers with herbs and poultices
    with our milk and careful fingers
    long before they began learning to cut up
    the living by making jokes at corpses.
    For we were making sounds from our throats
    and lips to warn and encourage the helpless
    young long before schools were built
    to teach boys to obey and be bored and kill.
    I wake in a strange slack empty bed
    of a motel, shaking like dry leaves
    the wind rips loose, and in my head
    is bound a girl of twelve whose female
    organs all but the numb womb are being
    cut from her with a knife. Clitoridectomy,
    whatever Latin name you call it, in a quarter
    of the world girl children are so maimed
    and I think of her and I cannot stop.
    And I think of her and I cannot stop.
    If you are a woman you feel the knife in the words.
    If you are a man, then at age four or else
    at twelve you are seized and held down
    and your penis is cut off. You are left
    your testicles but they are sewed to your
    crotch. When your spouse buys you, you
    are torn or cut open so that your precious
    semen can be siphoned out, but of course
    you feel nothing. But pain. But pain.
    For the uses of men we have been butchered
    and crippled and shut up and carved open
    under the moon that swells and shines
    and shrinks again into nothingness, pregnant
    and then waning toward its little monthly
    death. The moon is always female but the sun
    is female only in lands where females
    are let into the sun to run and climb.
    A woman is screaming and I hear her.
    A woman is bleeding and I see her
    bleeding from the mouth, the womb, the breasts
    in a fountain of dark blood of dismal
    daily tedious sorrow quite palatable
    to the taste of the mighty and taken for granted
    that the bread of domesticity be baked
    of our flesh, that the hearth be built
    of