The War Monument

My body is a battleground between hostile strangers.
The borders are scars that ache from the fight.
One white foot and one a dusky olive,
a smooth black leg that bears hard upon
the disputed ankle. On the other side.
an unmistakeable housemaid’s knee.
My skin is a map of wars fought:
my left arm would enslave that hand there
and my heart plots campaigns of conquest
to extract riches from my spine.

How is it I don’t topple like stacked crates,
returning to the disorder from which I came?
A miracle of diet or a mental regime?
And how can I coordinate a throng
suffused with hatred, each for each?

I owe no one an account of this.
My only duty is to seek my own reasons.
If I am a threat to civil culture,
by artifice unruly in my every part,
know that you are no different:
a stew of savage and noble in one frame
from now until the day you die.

I do not curse people, inasmuch as I see
that each is born a strange chimera
already cursed every one by their own
elusive, silent, arrogant creator.