KarMel
Scholarship 2008
|
Poem “Ronin” By Leah Colburn |
Desciption of Submission: “A free verse poem on
pansexuality and the different ways we view ourselves.” - Leah
|
Nobody knows whether I am male or female, not even
myself. I am a masterless wolf, roaming the forests of imagination. Like the
waves for which I am named, I surge restlessly in search of fulfillment and
fate. I would serve, if an honorable master would have me. And I would reign,
if honorable men would submit. I am not unique.
There are many ronin, wave-ones, restless and yearning, wavering
between the edges of the sharp-sided world. We are shadow people, unseen and
pointless, lacking the context of reality that binds ordinary people and
gives them significance. Our freedom is our curse. We will never give it up for the lesser options of one or
the other; but we will never fulfill it either, for the world is so ordered
that we fall between the interstices. Between male and female, gay and
straight, dominant and submissive, captive or wild. We are not switches, not
bisexual, not hermaphrodites, but something altogether Other, a new kind of
being, a being without a name. I call us ronin. I call myself Ronin. Do you need to know if I am flesh, or I am fantasy? I
am plastic and blood and metal and meat, building myself out of the materials
that are at hand. Some of the materials are exotic and sensuous,
some of them are old and worn. I am a matrix of being, self-assembled out of
spare parts and improvisations. Sometimes I am an angel, with breathtaking beauty that
would stun you if you ever happened to look with unclouded eyes. Sometimes I
am a demon, with conniving smirks and slanted eyes, pointed ears and horns
and a boneshaking laugh. Most people don't find my jokes funny. I know what you feel, every ronin knows it. We were
once like you. Once we had two choices, male and female, dominance and
submission, gay and straight, until we discovered the abyss beneath our feet
and having once seen it, found ourselves eternally plummeting into the chasm
between conventional truths. We cannot straddle the chasm, choosing when to cross
from one side to the other. We cannot put on and take off masculine and
feminine - they are melded inside us. We desire the freefall of imagination,
and our orientation is fusion, confusion, and delusion. Yours, not ours. We
know what we are. We want you to become like us. We want to people the planet
with restless surging minds that shape their bodies in accordance to their
will and whim. We desire the imagination in all things; the escape from the
straightjacket that is either/or. We want you. Let me explode your mind so that you will never again
be able to grasp the sharp edges of conformity that make me bleed. Let me
hurl you into a beyond so that you can never find your way back to what was.
Renew. Be you, but be more, be other, be self. Be surprise and pain and
curiosity, but be kind. Be me. |