All these heroes
who find the front of the room
to disrobe,
to proudly say I am gay,
I’m an alcoholic,
I have been wounded
and can show you how to live
with the liberated raw.
And me,
after scratching for a long while,
and listening in the night,
and letting the black sludge
pour from my bowels
in a paltry stream
on a small patch of ground
… my name is Heather,
and I’m not very nice.
Huge secret, that,
which is partly the joke
shared by men and women
at the front of the room,
bringing stories into light
after darkness
mostly hid them from their own view.
And me, I live with
nasty Gollum,
not the famous quester
but a little one
that scrabbles on my path,
whispering my need of more,
darting off to check the path next door,
cold and lonely and quite mad.
All this old steel for cage,
checking at the useless lock,
keeping her out of sight
except for all the times
she slips through the bars
… I give up the warden role,
stop pouring resources
in false penitentiary.
Fighting her has taken too much
from my heart,
has robbed my loins
of necessary nasty,
has sucked air from my lungs
that needed fuel
for belly fire.
I am not very nice
and you’d better hear it.
My aspirations of niceness
depended on a static clean,
a future transfiguration.
I choose instead the journey,
leaving the cage behind us on the trail,
letting my Gollum
squeeze my neck and pull my hair
as I carry her piggyback
and we trudge
or sometimes whistle on our way.