THE TRUTH OF MY FEELINGS

I'm sitting in the cinderblock office of fabricated yellow-light
remembering Mrs. Miller's ninth grade english class
and her Second World War: it was all taboo actions and deniable
consciences and akward silences trying to pronouce
Bergen-Belsen, Frankl, and Wiesel.

When corrected for errant tonality, I told her Wiesel didn't sound
like the animal, it was sounded like the man who witnessed a violin-corpse;
Auschwitz and Dachau sounded more like animals who
don't creep nor slither, but moved like tall skinny things
with hair, stepping stealthily down hooker-streets. Every boot with every
walk pricked loose eyeballs, squirting prescience-jelly in streams
like bottled ketchup.

But I was only fifteen and our assignment was to bring a picture
representing the Holocaust, and explain why it reminded us of War.
I became addicted to clandestine snapshots of spirits, heavy-weighted with
death-patience, their persistent souls bursting through taunt
skin in rib-forms and bulging eyes, legs the size of my two fingers.
To hide my misunderstood narcotic, I took a photograph
of a regeal sunset, and said it reminded me of life-ending.

I didn't know it then, but I hated everyone around me who made
fun of lampshades made from skin, with tatoo-stain glass designs. Why'd I enact
such abrupt thundersteps away from a gibbering crowd? What did I know? Fifteen
is a young age to speak in political correctness and propriety. In time
I'd understand that Wiesel is articulated exactly the same as "weasel."
It's syntax.

Society forgot her young understudy, and I sprung of ashes silting the ground,
a phoenix with ruddy feathers and a vibrating heart. Timidity of
spirit no longer starved my mind into producing pitilessly nothing;
instead, I wept openly, enduring nights of compassion for
sunken-chested men and childless mothers barracked in straw and fleas.
Days upon days of bending over, I'd give tears to the ground upon
which blood was shed, and cradled nothing in my arms, in attitude
of previous lost hopes. I gratituded survivors for teaching the semantics
of survive, articulated like "live."

In time, I beguiled even my own rationality by considering the architects
of crematories and publishers of black and white lists in bolded letters, dragging
their fingers down a hundred columns to find a name-listing for that nobody
of significance waiting in earnest at the front desk. I'd abandoned consideration
of those type of persons before my ninth grade year. In fact, I'd
abandoned them in elementary school when bullies would throw
stones in my direction as I hid under the quaking aspens, abjectly avoiding snide
comments and word-darts at my ugly haircut.

Consideration blossomed into recognition, and recognition
into feeling, and feeling into charity. Now, in my World War,
there were prisoners both fenced in and fenced out of ammunition
factories and wash houses that fed poison drops through slithering
pipes. There were hearts entombed in propaganda and hearts enchanted
by the thought of a frozen death-sleep. Both were victims of something
awful: the ashes themselves and the ash-scatterers, the shooters
and their targets, and not forgetting the patients and their doctors.

I've found myself, in worlds of feeling, dropping deep into my heart
of hopeful humanity:

I'm not young, I'm not political, I'm not biased,
I'm brokenhearted and love them all.