MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 27)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about societal norms, mortality, misinterpretations, poverty, self-destruction, power dynamics, Amway, patronage, masturbation, creativity
guarding food again by spitting on it, echoes of boyhood misread whispers etching lifelong scars hanging up the shirt of your own death, among the others an everywoman, ignorance enabled her confidence only a frozen apple pie from church for Thanksgiving pasty hipsters in pastel grandma dresses and cowboy boots, kombucha in mason jars unsure whether the tangle of vines woven through the fence links, rusted and skewed, make the beer-bottle blight more or less bearable would you still haggle for the yard-sale doll if you knew its rose-cheeked head would become, even within the decade, some hermit crab’s shell? jumbotrons at the Amway convention: mansions and bikini-backed jet skis montaged to Calloway’s “I Wanna be Rich” scrotal raphe—a satellite image of the Himalayas bragging about embarrassing things to highlight the absurdity of bragging desperate for jail time for these ideas so that others may witness the fervor with which they are held fresh generations would use our speak if they cared to communicate with us— hence our being so unsettled by their slang with exception to their basement rooms for AA, so many churches have become ostentation theaters where we rub in each other’s faces how put together we appear—not how pleading for pardon we are sabotaging your dreams, hurting what you love, only to fuel some unplumbed program of self-hate the duke’s patron funds withdrawn because his oil Jesus turned out “too Jewish looking” for those who like to be more fluid in gender, race, IP address, friend group, and so on, thank God the cyber realm is more important than the meat realm: it is still hard for a man to transition into a female who can birth a literal baby sciatica intense from impacted bowels soon to fall into the past, the old say “honor the past” making love to yourself before the mirror void fear and indolence veiled as discipline and constancy the spectrum of collateral consequences from our daily cocktails largely hidden the coach who did ask the parents first if the boy could pose in his underwear for an acrylic painting was fired nonetheless what does it say about ordinary people that they scorn thinkers for “splitting hairs, overcomplicating things,” when thinkers— human thinkers—cannot help but simplify what is much richer? brown ass-crumbs behind the back rim: toilet toaster leavings hands soiled with self-pleasure spunk lather-resistant in a sink overflowing with dishes match-maker dads betting their sons can beat up any kid on the block the mocked child grows up to be one who highlights his insecurity by projecting a tough guy persona we stop refusing the praise after the refusal only results in the praise getting laid on thicker— but might that have been the point of the refusal? kids roaming nocturnal sidewalks in search of cigarette butts reformed radical lesbian the boy in the driveway whose ball fails to bounce back the phone punched out of her hand because the ambulance is too expensive the lost, confused, mien of the hungry if the ultra-rich should one day stop being upright, they might even buy legislation that disregards the warnings of science his knee steering in secret, the dad lets go of the wheel with a sudden “You drive,” terrifying the child reminisces by old friends turn the father alien to the eavesdropping boy hospice workers forever fazed by what not-alive looks like acting as if you already heard the news when someone, who assumes that you have, reports in tears sorrow for your loss despair over limitations unconquerable in the artist’s lifespan—that faded once they were seen as keys to distinctive creation is it a sign of a systemic vendetta against men that they are arrested more than woman— or is the more obvious answer the answer?
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.
Photo: thesun.co.uk/news/9086344/hermit-crab-doll-head-plastic-pollution/