with neighbors on all sides,

yet sometimes

a pair lurch for each other,

and where they collide

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it carved a crater nearly twenty miles deep, vaporized

a wall of water,

building a brief circle of Everests

out of the earth’s crust as

magma poured forth into the furthest reaches of the solar system,

setting a billion trees ablaze back on Earth

and tipping the planet backwards into near

lifelessness.

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to be turned into mountain

but it cannot be comfortable

for when has anything

breathtaking

ever been formed in comfort

and not the pressure of

two stubborn plates playing chicken for keeps,

scarring glaciers grinding their descent

down slopes lubricated

only by their own melting essence,

roaring rivers preparing their path

as they take a shoulder here, carve a furrow there,

forever descending into dissolution.

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to stare at

the unpainted wall

of the windowless room

across the tiled hallway

from the bench

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as it so often does:

sparks break free from a fraying wire of

a neglected appliance,

find new life in the folds of

a velvet curtain or

the soft surrounding embrace

of a plush pink carpet

and birth fire, licking the walls,

devouring the ceiling,

penetrating the floors above

and engulfing the entire

structure in silken flame

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as they close gently but

inexorably around my neck.

The dark pools of your dinner plate eyes

are holes a thousand yards deep.

Your fine feathers flattened

by the force with which you fight

the very air that bears

you aloft. Golden sunset glints off

the deadly curve of your beak,

sharp as a scimitar where

it carelessly caresses the contours of my collarbone.

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the friend who held me

through my year of fear and pain and defeat and waiting

exhale into memory in my arms and

said no to the someone else’s dreams, opened wide and

let the pieces fall into grooves of a life

built for years in frozen fog,

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I did not realize

that I could have my heart broken

by a country, by a season, by

the winter sun, by a walk

to the DMV, by the snowdrops bursting

from the edge of the sidewalk, by the man who

smiles at me as he passes, by his dog, even,

because what is a transsexual for, even, if not for your judgement, your

scorn, your painful envy, your throbbing

want of a freedom so far beyond your feeble imagination

that you tremble in its shadow, that you gasp

for even the hint of its aftertaste floating

through the morning fog, burning

its golden path

into every tomorrow