He, demanding. Aggressive.
Me, passive. Hiding.
Why do I always cherish secrets, hatefully,
with a punctual predictability
better than my postman.

In the inner power struggle
the secret always seems to be the only way to
make any sense of not saying
not being able to placate
or to communicate
or to gain desires.

What I say never matters.
Only my actions matter.
I have an astounding ability in
intersections and beddings.
But beyond the bed,
my active energy slows to passive.
I’ve figured out that I can ask
I can suggest
I can explain
but it never seems to make a difference.
Sometime I hide in these written words
because the spoken never
matter.

It all seemed to start in 5th grade.
Demeter chasing Persephone
across the classroom in a rolling chair.
Like herding cats, 5th graders don’t listen to 5th graders.
Pretended practicing until I was blue in the face
spitting grass of the back baseball field.
You Hades. You the Pegasus dragging the closest thing we had to a chariot.
It was a pale attempt at directing a play
by someone whose words often didn’t matter.

But still, I think these lessons began even earlier.
Usually all situations can be traced back to the past
into history, through millennia.
Mine was a house of punishment and control.
Love was there too, but behavior and thoughts carefully sculpted
made an ordered forest without questions.
Certainly, there, I learned to hide from punishment.
My words didn’t matter because there was only one word.
The funny thing is that Logos doesn’t even mean word.
It refers to the divine knowledge and animation of the universe.
Logos is not limiting. But somehow I was limited.
Their logos made my word a kowtowed slave.
The word “no” became meaningless. Only yes and yes sir
and yes Jesus and yes I’ll do it, yes I understand, yes I agree
yes yes yes.
And yet they wondered why I had such a hard time saying no to “sin” when
I learned the evil of no from the end of a pink yard stick.

So there we go, this is why my words don’t matter unless I’m saying yes.
Yes is the only thing I know how to do.
Anything less than yes gets twisted back in scowls
the sting of punishment or a simple back turned.
What’s more, I don’t know how to deal with no.
I can only deal with yes. Disgrace becomes
an uncleanable mess of turpentine on my floor so yes,
yes becomes my friend. And no,
no becomes the whispered passings of
a fly before swatting.