Complaint of Archilles' Heel
Everyone’s so quick to blame my tenderness.
My wound opening like a mouth to kiss an arrow’s steel beak.
A beautiful man, now, plants his face in Trojan sand while I tell the secrets
of his body— make the ground red with truth.
Red with the death of Achilles, felled by an arrow’s bite
when nothing— nothing—could puncture his Kevlar skin.
Everyone skips ahead to the moral: don’t be a heel.
For just one day I felt sun where the chafing bonds of sandal should have been.
Without me, he’d be just more fodder for the cannon.
I made him a hero, Troy’s poster boy.
Everyone forgets I was part of him,
I needed him--that even as he died, I tasted each pulse— that I could not hold back its rush of red birds
or the season to which they flew.
Everyone’s so quick to blame my tenderness.
My wound opening like a mouth to kiss an arrow’s steel beak.
A beautiful man, now, plants his face in Trojan sand while I tell the secrets
of his body— make the ground red with truth.
Red with the death of Achilles, felled by an arrow’s bite
when nothing— nothing—could puncture his Kevlar skin.
Everyone skips ahead to the moral: don’t be a heel.
For just one day I felt sun where the chafing bonds of sandal should have been.
Without me, he’d be just more fodder for the cannon.
I made him a hero, Troy’s poster boy.
Everyone forgets I was part of him,
I needed him--that even as he died, I tasted each pulse— that I could not hold back its rush of red birds
or the season to which they flew.