breathedout | "Metaphor" (Reply)

(Content warnings for rape, violence, war)

If they were to borrow from the forests
the necessary vagueness for their image,
they would be lying,
the image laid bare.

Our cities will remain
on their knees, hopeless,
falling like slaughtered goats,
raping our cunts with brooms.
They are the true forests.

From the kitchen my mother announced
the fall of Baghdad.
There were nations and uncountable shaved heads
standing in the living room
as the bare forests wept.
No vagueness but in their books.

Whenever they borrowed from the sea
its blue to describe their intentions,
their mothers fell into the jaws of sharks.

If I said in a poem
that love is blind as carnage
and meant it,
I would be lying.
The victims would seek revenge
for my transgression
and strip your love from my skin.

I was lying when I likened
my desire to tigers.
The first is base,
the latter mighty.

When I tried to rouse a reader’s pity for my heart,
I made it shrivel like a pumpkin.
I was lying.
I made it yellow like the pages of the Old Testament.
I was lying.
I turned it into boiling tar.
I was lying.
I conjured a sewage ditch.
I was lying.
I sat it on a sharp stake.
I was lying.

It was a mute lump of clay,
nothing more.

When I swapped therapy sessions
for poems that cost nothing
to survive, and poured into them
the stuff of previous minds,
the lie flourished
like stalks in a forest.

Forgive me,
have I transgressed again?

I mean like sta—the li—
the stalks are li—

The point is.
The problem is not that poets are liars.
The tragedy is that they’re believed,
blindly as carnage.