It's March 8, a Saturday

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.