Poem: The Bidden Wound by Ricky Ray

The Bidden Wound

By Ricky Ray
QuailBellMagazine.com.

Tagging along on the high-tide of your ruminative incision, is it any wonder that the wound racism inflicts on members of the offending race fails to heal? Should we be surprised that when a cultural grief approaches closure, there's no end to the line of those willing to dig their fingers in and tear it open anew? Setting aside psychosis and the more hardened hearts of humanity, what unspoken acts of horror, guilt and revenge do angry, downtrodden men harbor for one another under their coats? What is that bulge there that looks nothing like a breast? I'm not sure I want to know the danger awaiting me in or near the average red-blooded male's armpit. 

​ The scent of something afoul seems oddly reminiscent of one's daily return to the world of the living: if the scent is missing, one questions one's nose and deeply distrusts all internal assurances that one is not still dreaming. Any semblance of a Utopian ideal nearly always means someone has stacked the deck, and the jury's still out on whether the hands of thieves truly remain where they belong. The body may be a sacred embodiment of divine fire, but certain somebodies could surely stand to be reminded of what a flame can do when the fury invoked by an angry mob bends one to its will.
 
In my mind, the smell of smoke and the hope for peaceful measures may ever be inextricably entwined—a helping hand at the end of one arm and a fist at the end of the other. If the devil wrestling his cloudy-headed counterpart is part and parcel of being human, and if a victory condemns this turf to an irreconcilable split, is it in our best interests that either side emerges triumphant?
 
Pitiful this condition that means a loss is a gain, that means little if any hope for a complete closure of our wound, that means significant scarring from the burns which underlie our silence, our practiced ignorance, our eyes so well-trained in aversion it becomes painful to acknowledge the presence of a human being. Should I consider myself forewarned that, as I turn down my collar and tighten the knot, the rope I played no part in placing around  our collective neck feels as though its loop must close before it may be untied?
 
Maybe, but complicit is as the inheritor does, and I am not done dying.