MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 45)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about Fist of the White Lotus, altar boys, call centers, pedophilic bukkake, healing stones, syringes, old books, misinterpretations, black-American entitlement
that transatlantic accent of kung-fu overdubs from the 60s to the 80s lips that toss altar-boy salads on the chalice from which we sip salvation janitor whistling calms the student cramming in the late library the call-center starlet could mimic the accent of every region critters fooled by woodstove heat into thinking spring has come a sea lion for a court jester, balancing the royal crown on its nose anchored by healing crystals back into the depths of superstition toddler bukkake by bandanaed Bloods only ever dipping into her suckling mouth out of an undeclared decency irreducible to the base fear of not wanting to get caught coconut eaters celebrate in dance, their chosen leader— a cockatoo—having squawked the decision to spare a third infant being ripped apart by hand for their god the eat-pray-love whites, left in a cluster by the rum-fiening monk to meditate alone at the price-gouging retreat, cult-smile at the tree antics of a rhesus monkey, who becomes what squirrels back home cannot: a living lesson in mindfulness that single potted plant in the corporate-cubicle farm— a silent manifesto of resilience, given how it flourishes in no more than florescence—turned out to be plastic fingers hook around flanges, bracing syringe barrels against plunging thumbs vernal suns roil stache funk sniffed not since summer the recipe passed down for generations, but like a phrase in a game of telephone givers who let themselves believe they are not out to build a resume just because the hiring boss is not on Earth the opening of a long-sealed tome releases a fragrance that transports him to a past he cannot put his finger on fighting your compulsion to prepare too far beforehand triggers panic that you have waited too long this time the teen girl in the quiet airport terminal just knew the neck-flap lady stared out of longing for sun-kissed youth (not out of shock for how much skin was showing) fingering love letters from the shoebox her mom had kept, at thirty nine she wonders to herself if she would ever be as distant to herself now as she is to the girl in her hands as if it were a playful child interrupting adult work, he tried to shoo away the intuition that would disrupt the carefully charted course the hunter should have known (since cancer just took his saintly wife)— or maybe he did—that approaching the stag with open arms, having set his shotgun down in the forest glen, would not assure an unimpaled heart “Rest in peace” and “I’ll see you soon”—bromides so often in tension the first players to wear mitts were guffawed off the diamond the courting blanket now under the family picnic rattlesnakes biting dew-berry hands bushy eyebrows resolute in a downpour the scriptedness undermined the reassurance squid ink released not in defense, but as a cipher for another of its kind feel-good clichés can create more problems, sometimes even metaphysical, than the ones they fake solve—God needed a new angel an experience of self-objectification, as in when one says “Good job” to oneself, taken as an experience of the divine within perhaps from the recesses of lullabies long ago, her favorite tune to play was the one that united grandparents she never knew on lover’s lane a sudden hand slap from a Jamaican vendor, as the tourist reached for a piece of fruit with her obnoxiously-styled edges, knocked the black-American entitlement right out of her sometimes the subject is not to be centered in the viewfinder condemning gay sex on grounds that it violates the purpose of the tongue even as you lick stamps you want to call out, even punch in the mouth, those resume-to-heaven givers so into their own feel-good trip of giving that they keep giving, unresponsive to your protests about how the gifts are a burden—but is it worth the stress? to survive that woke horde dead set on eating even teachers who explain that “nega” is how to say the Chinese “um,” rub zombie blood all over you—and a low-cost way to do so is to fire, for any hint of deviation from wokeness, your least-empowered staff polo shirt unbuttoned with no undershirt below, his wife fixes the collar caught open by the strap of his bookbag and says: “Goin’ bareknuckle?”
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.