Medusa and Me

It’s like you’re lost to me forever,
when you suggest my exploration
of the personal, politically,
is nothing more than a distraction.

Then, blank-screening me,
you sit with such an irradiating gaze,
your face quivering around the gills,
and tension eating up the air,
what else can I do but turn to stone?

And all the while,
blind to your role in it,
you, nevertheless, have eyes,
to see me disconnect from you,
and from my feelings too.
This tendency of mine to generalise
is how the links are severed,
you hypothesise.

Yet isn’t this just a theory that is easier for you?
Nothing to do with me, and where I am.
It’s what you know, or think you know.
And you are trying to railroad me into it:
your version of a Gulag Archipelago.

This is why I turn to stone:
to protect my identity;
for now, how can I trust
you carefully to finger
the many details, large and small
of its intricately worked brocade -
in fact a long ago moth-eaten masquerade,
that I had hoped you would feel through
to wilder patterns that are usually taboo;

and, then, even more importantly,
share who you are yourself,
however many-layered
or crudely daubed -
not literally, but so I know
that you are there.

Yet now, instead,
you’re tied up, like your hair,
in snakes, which cannot be transformed -
so tantalisingly close,
yet ultimately withheld:
the conductor of an orchestra
who will not raise her baton,
the music always never being played,
the muffled drum belied,
and everything between us petrified.

~ by bod1952 on October 6, 2008.