What You Have Heard Is True

There are many and many things you've heard,

Things that are true about me.

It's funny, it's funny the things that are true

Of all that you've heard about me.

I'm an obelisk cowering in wind-whipped sands

Of a desert, that's how they left me.

I, who had swaddled them both in white dresses,

Had suckled and brought them to be;

Had housed in my body, had twice halved my soul,

And loved unconditionally.

Unimportant, it seems, are the ranch hands, the horse blood

Through which trembles our legacy.

Trifling, perhaps, are the words that I read them,

Yeats' torch songs and Annabelle Lee. 

Shoved under the door on a Wednesday, wet spring,

Lay an envelope addressed to me,

And its letter bore words and each word bore a will

Whose intent was to kill me, kill me.

It was written by doctors with faces as mean

As African death masks; who see

Only themselves bearing scepters of science, as gods

of divine Psychology.

The doctors, those doctors have torn them away

From my breast, from my bed, from me;

Hacked away at the trunk and split with an ax

The roots of my family tree.

And I'm left here among the debris.

May their snowcovered faces wax round as pink-moons and

their sicknesses lift by degree,

May they sing cowboy songs to their daughters and never

Be ruined; but may they grieve for me.

For they never meant less to me.

They never meant more to me.

They are me,  am me, were me.