Bleeding Borders

Bleeding Borders

The human body’s largest organ: skin.

A casing for our bones, blood, and muscles:

Hearts and guts and minds and brave, cherished souls:

Innards in-held and faux-fleetingly safe.

Cities and states, skin-like casings:

Uncut sausages and cakes and puddings:

Nations from war, flame-fraught in dark kitchens

And fatted on lambs and equality.

Paris: as American as Gotham,

London, Benghazi, Moscow: satellites

Beaconing like Voyager: gold records

Beyond Milky Way’s borders: unbounded.

Like refugees and immigrants, banished

From their homes—expatriated by war.

From ancient map-lines hazardously drawn,

Nations from fictions; nations from nothing.

Explosively, souls released from their skin:

Spirits fly high, unbounded: borderless.

Shattered homes, tanned hides, beheaded, expelled,

The ins turned out and the outsides turned in.

Pounds of flesh, megatons, desert-extracts,

Flowing along tributaries: long-since

Dried Canals. Dammed, damned on gun-powdered hands,

Defenseless, cursed with nothing to defend.

Ideas as weapons, stateless enemies  

Without their own borders, seek caliphate:

No tank, nor drone strike nor Kevlar too strong.

No wall high enough, no skin thick enough.

Organs hum in memoriam: lost skin,

Notre Père: Allahu Akbar: Praise God.

Gods that pre-date each others’ own, prophets

Against the flesh of heavens’ fantasies.

Libertines all, Parisian all: shadows

Of the guillotine’s razor sharp memory,

Jail-stormers and Rights of Man declarers,

Alighting the world with fraternity.

When borders touch, skin to skin, hands in hands,

Embraced in sweating sorrow, moats from tears,

Blood from whines, spirits join with the fallen

Angels and ascending devils, fire-bathed.

Mourn, humanity, for bleeding borders,

For those whose caskets we flag-pall, for those

Poor huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,

For those on Lady Liberty’s roster.

Dress, humanity, your bleeding borders,

In red, in white, in blue: torn, bandaged skin.

Press chest to chest and erase the boundaries

Between organs, heartbeats, and grieving kin.