MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 44)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about digital oracles, keyboard prayers, mining the past for hope, cyber influencers, alien kids, pop ringtones in libraries, Madi's masturbation-scented fingers
a status symbol in earthly soirees to come: bottled water from Martian polar caps a lighthouse keeper, sailing dreams deferred until death pain raided for artistic inspiration kids smoking hollow sticks in a pre-cyber forest fan letters returned to sender a prayer, sincere from your own heart, typed into a search bar each line required hisses from an off-stage prompter sizing-up whispers of condolence at funerals much more about the fashion choosing to do what will buy you time to think of a better way out tourists pose for selfies with trees from the heyday of polytheism city parks too manicured for homeless refuge starch concentration in the toddler’s saliva has its shirt smell of spunk penis inside the toilet paper roll while pissing the island girl, her mom slapping away her hand, amazed at how pink his nipples are each western day so dead with fear and lies, the poet arrives like an unexpected letter farts that interrupt the urine stream clock hands, the red one too, untethered to the clock allowing herself to drift in a gamble that the right course will emerge thinking held hostage until the body gets its caffeine ransom slow-afternoon reggae beats aside, “spliff” packs so much sound in just one syllable— a linguistic puff of smoke, curling and unfurling in the mouth the adjunct’s dream to be one of the taught greats dwindles behind his freeway-flyer eyes, doll-like, with each red-pen iteration of freshman composition the street painter, but still not his art, becomes visible— for a moment—to the phone heads of the metropolis as an influencer pauses to halo material for his vlog children of that star canvas above sketch futures unfathomable to earthbound elders artists condemned for having influences on their style, as if any of us popped into flame from the spark of our own resources alone a forgotten author speaks like a ripcord doll, for just a heartbeat, as a girl passing through reads random lines from a yard-sale book gurneyed through the hospital ashamed of their state under so many eyes, but dying there within hours the only truly tarrying engagement with the museum mural happened through the grainy lens of a security camera one pure note after so many swells awakens him for the sacred pause that is the end restaurants hire uniformed security to protect gated garbage from rummaging bums each banana in its own foam tray, stretch-filmed like ground beef burkas dumped after acne branches screeching gutters ransacking memories for someone who might help a sudden innocent urge to Google whether you are loved sometimes the subject is not to be centered in the viewfinder in a moonlit ritual of midlife mushrooms we hoped would heal, a bear cub stumbled out of the brush and became the centerpiece of our sacred circle condemning gay sex on grounds that it is a choice not a drive (and thus unnatural) even as you choose to wear only dark clothes condemning gay sex on grounds that it is a product of degenerate society even though beasts were at it before humans abstract painting deemed unrealistic despite the splatters of color painted by dawn stories, for him, were trojan horses—ways to be propagandistic without seeming so penis lifted, exposing sweaty balls to fan wind the hermit crab ventures from its shell into fresh sensations toddlers picking up on cues for vegetable aversion: TV faces furrowed over greens—plates fork-screeched the tycoon was an early pioneer of displaying zoo creatures in “unnatural settings”: walruses, for instance, bow-tied in fax-machine mailrooms
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.