C^?O^?M^?M^?U^?N^?I^?T^?Y

Not every wolf in sheep’s clothing is hungry, not every actor
    acts in their role.

        Today, tomorrow, and too many days before
     are defined by an in-sense of dispossession, of my sheepish
huddling among carnivores.

                          Fold or pack or herd
         or mob: no collective noun has a room for me.
Acronym’s bust at my weight: thinlone, hearthurt, unsure
          whose skin exactly I want to be bunching in.

I exist in daylight. Pig triplets slam doors, Red Hooded girls dig mace
       from their purses, farmers lift far-pointing rifles to their shoulders
while the sheepdogs give chase. It’s exhausting:

        to be nothing, to be uncertain, to be certain
        only in that you don’t feel at home in your kind
        while terrified you’ll never fit in outside of it—
                    in a Q, a +, or an asterisk.

I sling sheep-names on myself in the night and chew gristle in the sun,
        but I’ve cried sheep for so many evenings that even I—like Cassandra
giving guidance to a mirror—don’t believe me.

         I have been an isolated interrogation of myself long enough to learn
  nothing. I follow the sheep from the tree-line, yet know what my pack feels.
     In the venn diagram of wolf and them I am
                 in another room, in a different tale, reaching a terrible conclusion
where both
                  this fleece and this fur feels equally exclusive, where I feel
     I’ve been the question too long that the answer has grown stale.

To persist as the question seems like the only way to feel certain of being part
     of something, while also knowing that to question is to not be fully
         within it, is to feel scrutinized and afraid of finding out
I’m just misled into trying on skin-tight queerness.

What if
            this question has been leading, has simply been an exploration
             into a progressive citizenship that ends with feeling comfortable
                   in my incisors again?

To be the question is to feel included
      conditionally.
To be the question is to feel suspended
      from life.

Many have forgotten how Aesop’s sheep-dragged wolf was slaughtered
     at the end of the fable by the shepherd, hungry for mutton.
Many have forgotten how all bones turn to soup when soaked too long.