MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 2)

Let's workshop this bitch!

watching the news to keep alive
hope that at least somewhere
things are still taking place

if you are going to perch yourself up in a tower
with guns and food for a death siege, what else
besides denial could have you pack deodorant?

drunks licking withdrawal sweat

creeks combustible from upstream factories

anti-sleep spikes in the sidewalk to solve our bum problem 

dozens of channels running nothing but nostalgic commercials

in a hug he tried to cram countless unsaid thanks

the floating sway of his head, as a cobra
erect in threat, turns subtle as the boxer—
no brainless bruiser—awaits an angle

how lighting the candle
between us kills the shadows
from under our eyes

driving by the childhood home 
only to find his birth tree erased 
undercut his intention to knock

that critical threshold when, merely among 
certain heaps of particles, there takes root
a nuclear furnace, a heartbeat, an awareness

ignoring the work-aspect of sex work
for the fantasy of really being wanted,
for the kink of dominating subhumans

the lives you would have lived (painter,
say) were you not what you are (writer,
say)—such lives may affect what you are

our reverential contemplation of Mother,
maker of Thanksgiving lasagna, often fails
to observe the clashed planes of fever she is

new smothering expectations,
new boxes, further shortened 
the thrill of coming out as gay

if only for further evidence of our ridiculousness, he hoped to find
Balboa, a fiction, arms high in the boxing hall of fame, but instead
he found Stallone himself there—as an “observer,” not a “fighter” 

*This is a portion of an ongoing mosaic poem called Made for You and Me. This portion is from the first installment: hive Being (Stanzas 2016-2020). More specifically, it is from the 2016 portion of that five-part work.

Painting: Agosta, The Pigeon-Chested Man and Rasha, the Black Dove, by Christian Schad (1929)