Once I tried to craft a whole essay
about my hair. The vitality of it. The need.
This was in the bad old days—
when I, a Mormon in love with agency, eked out
under the mummified McCarthyist thumb
of a Mormon totalitarian university—
and in a land across oceans, where
my friend with degrees in Arabic and
Russian literature had sent me to learn,
I stood in structured lines for bread of life
on Friday Sabbaths next to shorn men
who asked how I could possibly care
about something they didn’t.
There’s only this to know:
Earth-life is not biting down
on dust grit to trade chances at rainbows.
You cannot bridle another’s passions, Morning-Star—
all freedom is good freedom.
There’s only this to know:
my hair is how I lean in with a secret wink
and tell you I was the wind, this whole time
I was the warm free zest of springtime gusts.
Thomas Sorensen adores the textures of a Roine Stolt guitar note, onion rosemary bread he didn't make himself, and speculating about sauropod internal cooling mechanisms. He loathes surveillance capitalism, leaving his family at the end of each visit, and fervorlessness. The most important event of his life was meeting his infant brother. His most dire fear is late-onset Capgras Syndrome in a loved one. Every night he savours a mug of some offbeat herbal tea blend, and a few minutes of guaranteed reading time. He is constantly baffled by the assumption that human selfishness is a given, “It's defeatable. It could be minor. We socialize each other further into it instead.” And, in his favourite future, he have raised and loved several children well enough to become the wallpaper in their hearts' safest chambers.
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