There was a time when I believed in community
after a lifetime as a self-quarantined outcast
It was a time when I also found myself
found ideology on dense impassioned pages
and atop creaking metal bedframes, love
and the ensuing embracing of fiery truth
Naturally aberrant, mine have been outlying truths
and so, I found solace in abstruse community
with others who had come circuitously to love
and others whose insight made them outcast
We met, conversed, ladled stews, filled pages
we positioned ourselves. I made a place for myself.
I was able to expand, at last to fully fill myself,
but as I spread, I only uncovered further truth,
findings I sometimes found amid inked pages
but sometimes beyond the borders of community
and to retrieve them there would brand me outcast
so, when needed, I stitched a lining around my love
Of course, the inevitable problem with such love
is that it led to a pattern of unraveling myself
until I started dreaming sweetly of being outcast
because the pariah alone owns a vital truth
that can’t coexist with the union of community,
so many heartbeats bound together like pages.
Trannies have our raves, commies have our pages
which we use to sweat out and soak up our love
and in this way bleed exhaustively into community.
And surely there was joy in this draining of myself,
putting my drop in the flowing river of group truth
and rushing past the dry banks of the outcast.
I stopped coveting the singular power of the outcast,
counting myself as another of the revelers and pages,
etching consensus, headbanging to collective truth,
a part of networks, another link in the chain of love.
as a vessel of the collective I drowned out myself
until at last the flood washed me away from community.
I am a flood of truth, a brave lightningrod, outcast
above the safety of community, somewhere that the pages
I saturate with rampant love can be struck only by myself.
(Whaaaaat?? I wrote a formal poem? Anything is possible…)