MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 60)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about dwarfism, gonorrhea, gnats, artists, meat bodies, coping with guilt, road rage, trees, suicide, lawn mowing, indigenous Americans, gang bangs, victimology
digital personas intermingle while their roots wither in jacked-in solitude days given over to the dispatches of war correspondents varied fingernail cuts for a finger painter’s range humiliated by her infidelities authenticity wrestles with opportunism when victim identity is a badge of honor the loneliness of a commander, hands clasped behind his back a run-in with the clap is no longer a rite of passage into manhood from the perch of smart screens, the naked carnage seemed just sterile statistics that contagious cheer in the clubfooted midget waddling to our coins like a duck to bread gnats drown on a forehead, dappled with grassy sweat, mowing through their roiling ghosts despite the assurances of his new sweetheart, the lover feels forsaken when, in high spirits with him near, she laughs hard with friends fear, loosening with age, was the grip that steered him away from suicide and from acting out a road rampage isolation, withdrawal from too much stimuli, for a break from their demand to be lifted— along with any of their offspring—into art filling up the car at a gas station paved over groves where first peoples once performed tasks too exotic for us not to romanticize as more spiritual than ours an occupational hazard of being a historian, especially one of philosophy, was the regressive tendency to hold, sometimes as self-evident, principles flouted today our selfied selves, our ideas, our beliefs, our avatars crammed together in various cyber spaces—our bodies cordoned off from one another like never before as if it did not already invite excellence-dimming implications all on its own, the university motto “The student comes first” is readily interpreted as “The customer-student is always right” slicing a vessel in a warm bath too many deep penetrations to smell right for those in normal territories what you pull out of your ass is often what is convenient lachrymatory bottle the heat of his spirit melts barriers burning bridges came easier than voicing remorse you want to believe that children do not remember her sanctity undermined by focus on her sordid aspects a caterpillar inches along the twig, impelled like us all by instinct's arcane script tree roots ripple the cobblestone walkway of human ambition the one who loves the other less old window pane—riven trough of the cedar frame awakening to a fog cloud in the bedroom hiding dubiety with fervor there is always that one chirping morning where it feels like the first day of spring regardless of what the calendar says hurting—almost as if in hope to obliterate— the person we have wronged: their presence, a paint smudge, never allowing our guilt to die when subjects that the artist wills himself to take on become those that take over his will fingers interlaced at his spine, the artist sees various options but knows which it must be: the one that will only isolate him further still
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.
