My Little Army

It takes all that I have to beat
down the cultural
timeline of my past,
of my mother,
of her mother,
of the centuries women walked through head
down
bundled up
hidden.
Power still comes with hips
swaying from right
to left
to lean back a shoulder and look
with heart but now
its all wrapped up in
two piece suits and
tight ass jeans
and pitting my life against hers and
wondering if you'll ever be that perfect
person
with the perfect life
and become who I am meant to be.

It is a force you feed, and mass
like a small army
those deadlines of
life
baby
man
house
perfect diet.
We stage all out wars with best friends and
magazine covergirls
we house our insidious soldiers in our
hearts and when
all three ventricles are full
they spill out into our lungs.

Lately I've been fighting them on my own
with a bat,
the wooden one that my father used
to teach me how to play
baseball
in the backyard
in summertime
in no rush to grow up.
I was someone dirty
and carefree then,
dreaming more than I slept,
and now
I'm rushing to hold on
to her.

After the slaughter,
I find this punishment to be too harsh,
the brutal force used against my
ideas of what-should-be
conter productive,
and in my anger to define
my life
my body
my dreams on
my own
I have culled everything,
even the most positive messaged culled.
the generations within
me gone,
cut away the voice boxes of the
women who birthed the woman that
birthed me
lost all connection
and suddenly I'm not a child
rebelling and free
and I'm not an
half-grown adult
running blind

and then suddenly
I'm sitting on a cliff,
far away from who I thought I
was
supposed to be,
the cage I built for my self
destroyed.
Here, there is
No trail in sight
no sign posts either.
Breathing into the
vastness of the sky,
I can begin again.
Sometimes
not knowing the way is the
exact
place become whole again.