Tattoo Archeology Poem by J. Barrett Wolf

Miles, wires, the clicks of keyboard
Muses, myth, rumor and legend
Artifacts and ancestors lives,
loves and losses painted on body canvas
from Papua, New Guinea to Newark, New Jersey.

When we speak in skin verse we are of one voice
One - yet many hearts knowing
places not so much secret, but avoided
by those content to leave no trace.

We strip off our mundane days
Bare ourselves as we receive the ink
Naked, lovingly, knowingly genuflecting
beneath honesty's bright blade,
slaking our appetite for painful truth.

Our histories are aboriginal marks, slash lines,
tribal glyphs and disney cartoons left on skin
to be seen but by others of the mark,
those few willing to go… deeper.

Some day they will read from our weathered hides
accounts of aching openness and infinite compassion
They will speak of distance between us with a lingering smile,
of howling loneliness the way we refer to plague,
some long forgotten malady…
referred to in ancient text.
Stories we could not tell in mere language
or leave to the predilections of perjurers
who would cast aspersions, like cheap spells, on our character
vexed as we redefine civilization as a skin condition.

We will be long gone then, to history, to legend.
Teachers for those whose yearning stretches
to caress our kindred spirits
to read the testament of our mirrored hearts
And we will be remembered...
Even when the tides are still and seasons change no more.