How many fetuses lie behind the word fool? You don’t address the wild. You moulder under your mind’s shadow, squirming worm-white amongst your diversity of small truths, vulnerable to the sun, or so you thought thought thought, turning at right angles past evidence-based ephemera ever inward, always away from the science-based truth capable of burning away your precious mysteries, thinking it’ll kill you with an excess of life if you let it, but you won’t, you’ve hidden too far to catch yourself out but not so far you can’t see your own wilderness reflecting imperfectly the real wild that eats pieces of you as your entitlements fall off, and then you realize that the real wild stays the same as you get smaller and smaller, falling away in increments parceled out according to a system which you’ll never, ever, understand, packed to your walls, wheels spinning while even transgendered others learn what it means to be a man. Give up. Give up, fool! Look wild in the eye and meet your maker. But don’t address it. For once in your life keep your mouth shut. If it helps, drop to your knees. Use the eyes in the back of your head and see the miles trailing back into the baby blue of beyond, before you were named.
Mark Kerstetter is the author of One Step: prayers and curses and blogs at The Mockingbird Sings: https://marktkerstetter.wordpress.com
Inspiration: As a victim in childhood of verbal abuse and the authoritarian discourse of fundamentalist religion, I have always been sensitive to abuses of language and those who attempt to use language to control others.
The CDC Poetry Project 
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