honey and sting

The Reason

In some ways, it's worse.
The unintentional blow, a sucker punch,
just when I let my guard down.
The one it would be rude to comment on.
That painfully awkward moment.
You meant so well.

It's just,
that unexamined remark, for example,
that just happens to be a direct derivative
of an old polemic long used to justify
the killing of the Jews.

Like the one about
the "Old Testament God of vengeance"
and the "New Testament God of love".
As if the sacred texts of my tradition
exist only as an object lesson
for Christianity.

Do you really believe, that as a Jew,
I have no grace?

Of course it cuts
in all directions.
Baal's priests slaughtered in the rain.
And all the Goddesses devoured.
Abraham knocking down the idols of his father's workshop
as if anyone, from their own perspective,
considers themselves a worshiper of false gods.
Backstory, don't you see? Press release and spin.
All hail the new religion.
Too bad about the old, but we'll find a way
to hold to what we like,
and discredit all the rest.
Like Druid trees at Christmas.
Or Elvis singing Black music
to America.

And what it must it be like, then,
to be Black in America, watching Elvis get the fame?
Or Brown, or old, or queer,
or any other way
that the Big Story doesn't see fit to tell,
and worse, does its damnedest
to deride?

But politely, don't you know.
In all innocence.
As fucking if.

So to all the fucking memes
I thoughtlessly bought,
(because, yeah, it cuts all ways,)
that I daily and unknowingly let pass through me,
the ones that shame, ignore, and disregard,
that condemn, belittle, annihilate, and betray,
FUCK YOU.

Get out of my body, my consciousness,
my eroticism, my spiritual archetypal conditioning,
my dreams, my words, my limbic system,
my fucking fixed action pattern responses.
Stop tainting my interactions
with your stink
of fear-driven paleolithic survival mode.
I don't want to be fixed,
anymore.
I don't want to fit in.
I don't want to be asleep.

It's no longer enough
(if it ever was)
to believe that all you have to do
is try.

It's time to try harder.
because ignorance kills, and perpetuates,
by default, the virus of hate.

Which is the reason
a passion to be awake
is so important.
To realize and refuse
all the ways we allow ourselves
to be mouthpieces
for a very ancient
war.

Enough. Enough. Enough.

For this
I pledge allegiance
of my unengendered Soul



(ETA if you're seeing this on LJ, it's also in DW, same journal name, which I can access during the day. I don't have access to LJ from work, and so can't respond to comments from there until evening.)

ETA 2: edited very slightly for grammar and word choice.