[sorry Mary Oliver] [sorry House House]
you do not have to be good

(you are horrible)

you do not have to walk on your knees

(you have no knees) (your feet are webbed)

for a hundred miles, through the desert repenting

(only a few miles, it’s a village after all, and

it’s a lovely morning and

you are a horrible)
                                               thinking about who gets to be bad
like geese … or some children

or some leaders

and their closest followers. very few

of the people I know enjoy

the grace of mistakes.

they’d probably love a gentle historical

wave of the hand,

less assumed responsibility, less criminal glance,

less epigenetic markers of this or that

shithole country of origin stress –
                                                                 Honk! Honk!
thinking of knees, thinking of scraping them,

getting my fifth tetanus shot – why’d the brits leave

so much scrap metal – was it our own fault – we should

have cleaned it up – and

pinching the puffy permanent scar from my third-world vaccine 
it’s hard to make good decisions when you want to be bad
                                                         stealth mode, if only
relatedly, sometimes I’m tempted by dominion

over the prairies and the deep trees

the mountains and the rivers

but then, I remember:

the world doesn’t offer itself to our imagination
                                                                 Honk! Honk!

choose smaller.
                  <<if we make a wrong decision, everything will turn to absolute dust>>
so I’m letting the harsh animal of my body, like –

so I’m complaining all the time, cute –

so I’m pissing angrily in my own toilet, ew –

so I make this farmer cry, wah wah,

the chud,

and I steal all the bells, ALL of them,

for my very own special ditch,

the village has no clue but yes, the rumours are true, it is me:
           ~ the most horrible, the most best, the most wildest of goose ~

               ~ I’ll never be lonely again ~
and then I’m walking the few metres up and down

our tiny carpeted apartment, and you’re

off to another appointment, in the crumbling animal

of your own body, and you’re saying something like

well, when we were young we didn’t have

all this, and the rice, the grains, if you trace them back,

were of poor quality, the best exported elsewhere,

for the empire?

and now all these illnesses, I guess I guess
I can barely hear

I just want a new noise that’s all, um:
Honk me to the moon!

Let me honk among the stars!

Let me see what honk is like on

Jupiter and Mars!

Weightless and unflappable – probably!

(in the history and family of things)