I Feel More Helpless With You Than

We May Feel Bitterly How Little Our Poems Can Do In The Face Of Seemingly Out-of-control Technological Power And Seemingly Limitless Corporate Greed, Yet It Has Always Been True That Poetry Can Break Isolation, Show Us To Ourselves When We Are Outlawed Or Made Invisible, Remind Us Of Beauty Where No Beauty Seems Possible, Remind Us Of Kinship Where All Is Represented As Separation.

The Suppressed Lesbian I Had Been Carrying In Me Since Adolescence Began To Stretch Her Limbs.

It Is The Thirtieth Of May, The Thirtieth Of November, A Beginning Or An End, We Are Moving Into The Solstice And There Is So Much Here I Still Do Not Understand.

An Honorable Human Relationship- That Is, One In Which Two People Have The Right To Use The Word "love"- Is A Process, Delicate, Violent, Often Terrifying To Both Persons Involved, A Process Of Refining The Truths They Can Tell Each Other. It Is Important To Do This Because It Breaks Down Human Self-delusion And Isolation. It Is Important To Do This Because In Doing So We Do Justice To Our Own Complexity. It Is Important To Do This Because We Can Count On So Few People To Go That Hard Way With Us.

The Danger Lies In Forgetting What We Had. The Flow Between Generations Becomes A Trickle, Grandchildren Tape-recording Grandparents' Memories On Special Occasions Perhaps-no Casual Storytelling Jogged By Daily Life, There Being No Shared Daily Life What With Migrations, Exiles, Diasporas, Rendings, The Search For Work. Or There Is A Shared Daily Life Riddled With Holes Of Silence.