#NaPoWriMo Entry #3: “To a Gay Child”

Today’s entry was inspired by this article.  Read it before or after if you so choose.

Now for the poem:

He dreamed about being a doctor —
or a writer, or an actor, or maybe something else —
does it matter what he dreams
as much as it matters that he dreams at all?
For is not the dream where all of us find
a better world?
The world we want to live in.
The world we wish could be real.

So he dreams that he might meet a man —
become a father, have a house, a career,
all the things the rest of us hope for —
and he’s told by those whose mouths
are too big for their feet:
No! Never! Ever! Ever!

No…who would have thought two letters
could become the discourse of a nation?
To overshadow every other way
we can conceive of the future?
That two letters could destroy that same future,
like cannons against a matchstick wall…
That dreams could become the self-serving devices
of a dying empire…

Are his dreams empty gestures from a forlorn soul?
The candle-lit whispers flickering
in the drafty tomb of someone else’s life?
Stolen by the specter of a gnarled tree yet to bloom…

The new religion:  a curled path up the mountain of man,
through the spider’s den of glass spires.
To steal his dreams, to replace them
with the facsimile of a self.
Is it any wonder that his wrists turn into mouths,
speaking blood letters to the constricted face of the rope?

He dreams for the relief from the last breath
in a body wracked by doubt.
He dreams because
that is all he has left…