MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 18)

Let's workshop this stanza sequence, which includes untested rape kits, migrant kids, farmers’ markets, intimate silences, letters never sent, sex with the spouse of a friend who just died, Feynman

using tricks when strength fails is a strength

remember when it was cool, rather than a trauma 
worthy of instant job loss, to stumble upon your professor
on campus past midnight playing the bongos naked?

reprimanding the boy, but in a tone that reflects
delight in his tortures—pinches, plucks, pricks—
of the Down-syndrome nuisance also in her care

digital editing to restore
the human jiggle Botox 
robbed from the forehead

saying bad things about those we love
as a conscious expression of our love
rather than as something to take back

with the advent of artificial intelligence, walls and shelves
perhaps would no longer become bare were we to reject
the work of artists with so-called “moral shortcomings”

sleep and food merely as means to fight the straitjacket 

coming ones who will not get to enjoy
the solace of knowing that their caretakers
will be dying soon enough as well

the sight of the death metal band 
of mentally disabled Finns makes one
laugh, become alive, say “Yes” to life

that stage where, for each couple swinging
a child between them in a parking lot, you think
to yourself, “All happy now until the divorce”

the early rise of the old

how much time was spent choosing what to watch?

the teacher’s interception of a slipped note

Sterno dinners

school cashiers taking lunch trays from kids who cannot pay

cheating as the next thing 
after marriage and kids
to block out the horror

her complaints about not remembering enough 
served to distract her from the agony of passing,
which would only throb harder had she remembered all 

blame and praise to sustain
hope in life having purpose,
in our mattering

even if we made them this way, now
they want to cook for us and blow us 
with little thought of reciprocation

loved ones who say, with pity in their throats,
“Don’t you have damn aspirations?” even as
you have been busy with them the whole time

expect soon a bloom of transgender toddlers
among Hollywood stars, desperate as they are
for causes—having peered behind the curtain 

beached whales euthanized with dynamite

untested rape kits collecting the dust of decades

kids crossing borders alone

maharishis get a pass on being dirty old men 
among those—farmers’-market whites, especially
feminists, are best—for whom they are exotic 

what you forget makes you 
in two ways: it defines you now
and back then it factored into your bloom

barring money considerations and the like,
do not marry someone unable to bridge
intimate silences with their eyes into yours

“Keep these red stones on you at all times, son,
because one day mom will leave you in the woods 
with nothing but a few crumbs of bread, the bitch”

the waiting of toll-keepers and store clerks

empty rockers creaking on porches

that false stretch of limbs before getting up to leave another’s company

avoiding the man who recites facts
about you that you have waited
too long to tell him are false

writing to a person, needing
him to see at the time, but never
showing him in the end

feel-good rationalizations, brewed up in bed
between the both of you, the morning after 
sleeping with the spouse of a friend buried yesterday

mega-vendors do not exude
that desperation that has you  
guilty at the farmer’s market 

people who point out your inadequacies,
and thereby gift you with potential pathways
to enhancement, are often not your enemies

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 of Professor Richard Feynman: wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2014/07/richard-feynman-sexism-and-changing.html