When I was young, I imagined that almost every living thing around me was capable of reasoning. I imagined that trees and flowers were aware. I wondered if roses hurt when I cut them for the vase. I cringed when an insect died, well, some anyway.
We used to hunt game and fish, and of course, it was a Cherokee tradition to ask the forgiveness of the animal that we wanted to turn into food or clothing or implements. My aunt would wring a chicken’s neck for Sunday dinner. She never asked the chicken for forgiveness, but I did. I never told anyone. My grandmother was not partial to spiders, but she used to say that spiders had to live, too, as she swept them out of the kitchen into the tender mercies of the chickens foraging by the back door. The same chickens that Aunt Patsy used to terrorize.
Originally, I entertained the conceit that a mysterious muse appeared to me in order to grant any wish and that wish was for me to turn myself into a poem. I wanted to witness and participate in what the reader was experiencing. After mulling that over for a bit, I thought I had a better idea, one in which I created a poem with a life of its own.
Which I did. But I never dreamed that the poem, I Am a Poem, Bisensual, would assume its own sentient awareness, not to mention its sexuality. That it did on its own. I know what the poem is doing now, but I don’t know about tomorrow, what it will do next. Just be aware that as you read the poem, the poem is reaching out to you, to touch you, to make love to you.
