Spiritual Autobiography

Of course I acted a fool after coming out.
Years of hidden anger hunkered by my door well,
a strange animal no one taught me to feed.
One conservative regime emerged from another,
once again deciding who is and is not.
Nights sweating through business casual in a goth club
helped liberate me from shame. Who cared
about a college seminar on spiritual autobiography?
Whether or not my parents believe in God, I was born.
Etymology is overrated, the professor said,
scoring my late paper, slashing down. I agreed
with the beguines who wrote plainly,
guided by figuration toward argument.
It’s true the soul capers out of misty, amniotic waves.

After Meeting a Seminary Student

Campus protests disturbed invisible commerce.
Are there fewer gulls because of the mutating virus?
An old mirror on the sidewalk radiated eerie vitality.
Outside a chapel, three kings in bed embrace like rhymes.
I’ll buy fresh oregano and add its mild purple flowers to my tea.
In winter, the season of the underworld,
one should eat starches and slow-cooked meats,
but it’s been so warm my block smells perversely of wisteria.
My student asked where poetry leads me.
Her heroes ordered their lives around artmaking,
lives unremarkably disastrous as my own
with unpaid bills and wine-stained teeth.
The beauty of the world, Simone Weil wrote,
is the mouth of a labyrinth. Find me there.