MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 67)

Let's workshop this stanza sequence about Malik el-Shabazz, Rigoberta Menchú, the ingredients of anger, Corinthians, Spinoza, Jesus, toxic creeks, fistfighting your mom, fistfighting a dog, God, Nazis

---

refusing Mom’s “swine Jell-O” after seeing Spike Lee’s Malcolm X

being itself pulses its unlimited exuberance through all (its) simulations

gesticulations of conjuration

catching blue crabs in the Hudson with bare hands

innocent wonder forfeited to solemn platitudes 

that wicked lust to strangle the hissing cat

those in the rally-sea who did not surrender the Nazi arm salute

participation trophies priming children for later “trauma”

the opportunism pounced upon in the collapse at least hastened the collapse

thriving in the carnage of a cruel machine did not have to mean
being cruel oneself: even yellow rapids harbor pockets of calm—
eddy pools in the lee of boulders—churning counter to the rage

crows drop walnuts on crosswalks
to ransack the tire-cracked innards
in the orchestrated truce of a red light

not in all the sham mudras hijacking our child wonder, true magic 
sang in the conjuration of an open hand extended without motive 
(waiting in faith for the other to complete the unrehearsed ritual)

those who will fight your lunging dog 
as if it were a man: punching, gouging,
even taunting “C’mon bitch! C’mon!”

those who, after things get cop violent
with the girlfriend, are welcomed back home
especially if return with drugs for the next round

those who have found their mom in bed 
rotting, only to bust up walls about how
“This cunt bitch had my fucking money!” 

sex amounts to your chromosomes and body parts;
objective gender amounts to where you fall in the big five;
subjective gender amounts to what you feel inside  

covering up one of the toxins released 
in the warehouse fire to hide from the competition 
the backwardness of their production process

older now, we think about Muslims
as we “once did” about blacks: “Even if 
we made them this way, their threat must be stopped”

on a stage of fake palm trees intended to set an indigenous tone, Rigoberta Menchú—
although refusing to address the calls to revoke her Nobel Peace Prize—announces 
that, out in the hall, items from her line of healing jewelry are for sale (some half off)

arranging the dead one’s journal entries by pen color

blaming some unnamed “rogue worker” in the press release

people who hear “Cesar Chavez” and picture instead the boxer

people who have gotten into fistfights with their moms

a clout chaser, yes—but clout 
mainly from the great dead: 
Goethe, Spinoza, Emerson

regulating “hate speech” may sound all well and good, until we consider
(a) who gets to label what is hateful and (b) the ingrained gremlin temptation 
to label “hateful” speech causing the labeler even the merest discomfort 

in the fierce competition for clicks, no wonder the lengths to which journalists go: 
from the relatively tame (headline baiting and cherry-picking and tabloidization)
to the still wild (fearmongering and allegations and lying and personal attacks)

from the bottoms of open-air ponds 
for spent nuclear fuel, amphibious drones 
scoop plutonium sludge for an Islam bomb

silver lining: industrialization
and depletion of natural resources
intensified our “love” for “nature”

strip anger of myopic self-interest—interest
driven perhaps by genetic-cultural-habitual
scripts of operation—to unveil: tenacity?

since it is so difficult for us to communicate with terrestrials
(from leaves to worms to lions to one another even), our chances
at communicating with extraterrestrials does not look the best

our cyberage might not be all gloom: the barrage of genius each time we open an app
renders unsustainable our—is it primate?—proclivity to feel diminished when others
do things well, opening us to a hive mode where we take pride in the genius of others

absolute power, real by definition, must express itself in all 
limited—finite, qualified—modes: the metaphysics behind
“power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

people who get disoriented
on escalators that are moving,
not on ones that are not

people who let jealousy spill over to rage
even before its sustaining doubt
gets the chance to change to certainty

creeks that used to freeze over in the years before the factories came

people who die without sending for a doctor

people who are anxious when other ears finally perk up for them

nepiophilia—clit made nipple

it goes by too quick, but think how it is for those waiting for you to die

being itself pulses its unlimited exuberance through all (its) transient shapes

a subtler strength manifest in the release of the choke

the ground below may be too fractured
for an optimal nuclear landfill here, 
but its people will welcome the work 

if you would drive the streets timorously, primed to swerve,
after nonstop crash news, imagine what cops are primed for
after lifetime media concerning what “these people” are like 

bracketing off the possibility that the tyrant has sufficient power 
(say, to inflict infinite and eternal punishment), lasting converts
arise by patient speech of inspiration—not by haranguing threats

if anything, we should be on our knees each day in gratitude that we were colonized
not by some jungle-law society but by the west—its enlightenment values and norms, 
its science and technology, nurturing and protecting the rights of the most vulnerable

---

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.