Here is a poem from The Black Forest that features today's date.
HEART OF 5000 BEAR
No king could break me
with speeches or
sweetmeats.
No queen could teach me
how to pray and mean it,
even how to meditate.
Even if she was my
mother,
my foot would undulate
like the giant country
all our oceans form,
the horizon outside
shrinking
into nervous rhetoric
in solidarity with my
interior.
The air turns Slovenian,
the palace smells like
cinnamon,
and I’m into it.
As a servant, I
understand suburbs:
like mine, their
biographies
merely parallel the real
story
these wet years write
upon the royal tarmac,
driftwood left behind a
fierce storm.
It’s March 8, a Saturday.
I’ve been sleeping in
this poem
for several weeks,
a pocket history of neon
tucked inside my jacket,
where hardscrabble
frontiers
dissipate into acceptable
weather.
In my cat-suit, friend,
I entered manhood
and surveyed all this
land
and indeed caused it to
be.
