I DON’T WANT YOUR BINARY WORLD

I don’t want your binary world.
You can keep it.
It’s no gift, really. A curse actually.

Long distance arguments
turn into
brief skirmishes in a decades-spanning war.

My every little expression dissected,
deconstructed, injected,
transformed into a wild assumption

making me look like an ass
and you and me?
But disagreeable opponents.

Is this what we call friendship or
an excuse for reason?
Battle lines drawn around diverse opinions

squeezed into skinny jeans
cutting off
circulation to our feet?

Or driving all that blood
up into our cheeks
until one of us inevitably erupts?

We can’t constrain our experience,
our dreams and virtues
into a true/false test or the Scantron

which replaces education. It just won’t
fit. Better to
honor our complexity and diversity

in thought and in flesh.
Better to see me
as I offer to be seen.

Better still to love me
as I am,
not a slave to your narrow ideology.