the short distance ahead 

dear alan turing, forgive me
for re-making your machine, the first
approximation of a computer with its 
stripe of paper & 0/1 number making.
i won't pretend to know what it's for 
but i'm told that it answers questions.
i ask myself if i write poetry for
the same reasons you took up a love
of numbers. in a video about your life
they claim you sought out truth 
& i laughed because people always assume
the numbers will be sturdy for us-- that we
can trust them to hold us. take the number 6:
the number of war-years & the number of men
who left their thumb prints on your neck. 
i want to meet you out on the front green
at cambridge, a notebook in your lap
as you write equations like love poetry.
what is the number bigger than all numbers?
i ask your machine & it writes a sonnet
about the end of the second world war 
& your code breaking calculations. 
oh we all know that heroes are stalwart like
numbers. are impermeable. the backroom
where you promised not to attempt making
truth out of his body-- you told him
that no one could ever ever know. i called
my brother last night & told him about
you. i asked him if he knew that the man
who made the computer was gay & then i said
that it's not fair to put the weight of our
words on people long passed.
my brother listened & the machine 
kept on going, trying to make sense of 
words between brothers. i wrote your
quote on the top of my notebook
we can only see a short distance ahead,
but we can see plenty there that needs to
be done &
i see you staring hard at the floor
of the doctor's office as they give you
your first shot of estrogen, the homosexual cure.
i told my brother how this was what they did
to gay men in england, the feminine 
hormone to make malleable bodies, to make
antidote of a heart. i feel guilty because
when i take hormones they arrange a man
out of me. i'm thinking of my own short 
distance ahead & the machine on
the counter top. until i met you i 
distrusted the numbers, always,
i saw them as a false sense of absolute--
the inarguable marble gods: the 14, the 15,
the 16 the years i spent raging inside skin.
why do we fight our bodies like this?
why do they fight our bodies for us?
the spot on the wall you look at as your 
body takes in the estrogen each week.
weeping on the end of the bed, numbers
written all across your body as if they
could right the wrongs inflicted on you.
the machine is giving me 0s which
means no no no no no
everytime i eat an apple i think
of the one you bit full of your own cyanide.
i tell my brother that i read history 
no because i think i can ever right a wrong
but maybe i can resurrect it, cut it open
give it numbers.