In aid of the "heavy topics" discussion, an example: "Queen Takes Black Knight"

Remember the "tough subjects" thread I mentioned a couple of days ago?
Or the entry I posted here with a piece of that?
Well, here's a poem that I wrote that I slam/feature with (written in 2002, featured frequently, slammed occassionaly) that involves rape. I like this piece. It doesn't do the things I dislike about poems that often mine this subject (or similarly heavy subjects) for weight. There's a story, there's a crime but it isn't presented in a graphic way, the former victim isn't helpless (it is, in fact about not being able to allow a survivor of such a crime BE a survivor), and it doesn't have Big Man In Shining Armor coming to her defense, physically or morally.

In fact, the knight in question is way off base.

Note: This is being re-tooled for the book that's coming out, so it will be slightly different before you know it.

QUEEN TAKES BLACK KNIGHT


QUEEN TAKES BLACK KNIGHT
I could always tell when it crossed her mind, the memory.
She would stare at the ceiling as if she were watching a film
from behind the movie screen,
backwards and so from inside that her eyes seemed burned from the projector.
I liked to think she let herself be vulnerable at these times
because I made her comfortable
because I stroked with a steady hand and wrote poems.
In reality, it was late and we were already naked and already spent,
and she was likely just too tired to pretend she’d never
been raped anymore.

And if you are a reasonably forward-thinking man in this day and age,
and you don’t exactly repel women,
or you’ve cut a rug with a fairly down-to-earth woman once or twice,
chances are you’ve spent time with a woman for whom
rape is not merely statistic.

And while there remains no easy or comfortable way to bring it up in
polite conversation,
let alone a conversation that’s supposed to go anywhere carnal,
I remember her stopping me at some point on our third date
and saying, “You talk a good game, but let me get this out the way.”

And I listened and I tried not to appear too condescending or too interested or too indignant or too unto-like-Man
and that day we went on talking about love.
It wasn’t as much fun from then on, but it was honest and clean.
It was the last whole leaf of autumn, unmarred,
resting on the hood of your car, making you late for work with its beauty.

Later,
I would hold her in the night when she wasn’t cold
and she’d turn on her side,
silently letting me know that she was fine
and I should lay however I wanted in the bed.
I would hold her hand when we walked, but not too tightly,
and she would twist her mouth at me,
give me a hard, prayer circle squeeze
and put her hands in her pockets for the rest of the day.
I would try to filter through the art section of the paper any film that might contain anything that might make her uncomfortable,
but I slipped once and we saw Bandit Queen and twenty minutes in I felt like the worst boyfriend on the planet.
Her?
She was wide-eyed and wrist-deep in a bucket of artery-collapsing popcorn, and when Phoolan Devi lined her rapists up against a brick wall for execution,
she jumped up from her chair cheering,
and I picked popcorn husks out of my hair the rest of the afternoon.

Before she left for good,
she turned to me and asked,
“What’s the point of surviving it if your man is going to treat you like it happened yesterday?”
And like that she left,
took my heart with her for good measure,
lest I trample one of her sisters with its stampede of good intentions
but slipped it back to me in the middle of the night months later
in a box upon a gold and leather saddle with a note reading,
“I have slain the white horses you keep in your stable.
I have cast your armor to the bottom of the Scioto from the Broad Street bridge.
When we need your help, we’ll call.”