should first undertake to examine the past. The nature
of the tree is spelled out in its seed; the height
it will reach, its lifespan, the tenacity of the roots,
all preordained by genetics, encoded and ordered
as inexorably as Calvin’s brutal conception of heaven.
Sitting, freshly raped, in a spreading pool of blood
on the floor of a packed gymnasium, surrounded
by my fellow children (all wards of the State),
I listened to a lecture on Abstinence, given by a man,
swathed in shiny brown seersucker, who informed me
that I (lacking, as I now did, a hymen) had
the approximate spiritual value of a plug
of used chewing gum, or a cold glass of water
that someone had spit into. I learned about
the potter who makes clay jars whose sole purpose
is to be broken. I learned that men will always be filled,
if they ask for God’s love, but women might receive
some trickle-down spillover, if they obey them. And now
I’m fixed on the Sower, scattering seeds (those ineffable blueprints)
onto the soil. I was well-plowed by circumstances,
by a blade and a will which existed emphatically
outside of myself. Thank God my churned soil was too stony
to tolerate more than a thread of root. The other kids were furrowed,
too, all mauled and turned over, all thoroughly processed
by the same State which placed us in that echoing room,
with a man on the stage who was (later) arrested,
though not held, for acts of pedophilia. They were fertile,
and those scattered seeds burrowed in and took vicious root.
