AGAINST RADICAL SOFTNESS ❋ Aeon Ginsberg

after Cam Awkward-Rich

Okay hear me out, my friends are soft
homes I find my head resting into.
This is my way of telling an ocean
I cannot live there if there are not doors.
The mouth is a door.

//

I cite the sand and how it burns
as it bakes, a body covered in glass.
When I speak of that which I stand
against I speak of violence and
the potency of a mouth privileged
enough to seal an open maw as it
slithers over my throat and closes.
Remember, the mouth is a door
and what does that make the throat
if not a closet in which we practice hiding.

//

Anyway, I say this to a friend
and my closet-throat whispers out
my door-mouth that I never see
the radically soft form themselves
a road big enough to block a highway,
an ocean has ways to keep the fish in
the water, keep in. Keep. The sun exits
my door and this too means
home is a place I cannot hide from.

//

I have never said there is no merit
in the Boa Constrictor, it’s mouth-body
builds bodies into caskets, both casket
and home are made of wood.
In this way softness is synonymous with
violence is synonymous with each
word, a doorknob.

//

We build locks with our convenience.
My mouth is a sliding door, no,
revolves. I struggle to keep anything safe.

//

Privilege is still a snake even if it
remains without venom, my body
is a home even if no one lives in it,
my beliefs are ghosts that haunt
the halls of my bones.

//

Okay here’s the deal. If you
italicise a movement enough
it becomes a graveyard. The art kids
pose on our names and I have been
a convict in this way. I cannot trust
the world to not make art of my home-body
when I am dead, just as I cannot rest
my head in a home my mouth
cannot fit around.

//

(first the author was a home
to a boy, then the boy italicised.
There as boxes with his name
on them inside of me. A gun
with someone else’s bullets will
still make soft a closet).

//

Do you see how the beach closes
it’s mouth around the ocean?
Do you see my bones turn to powder
in the embrace of snakes, how
my ashes blend into the water
and you could swear
our names spell the same address.