#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: “To a Gay Child” 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…