MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 4)
Let's workshop this draft!
coffin below the tree, Christmas morning, for the terminal daughter if only these starving Somalians knew the power of manifestation boards popular among anorexic Tumblr girls in the US the beauty of decades back, when tweens hid deep in the closet, was that parents did not fret so much about sleepovers we laugh at those with taxidermy even though we bronze baby shoes and cannot part with our vinyl astrology is all fun and games for those privileged enough to be born in cocoons of critical acumen, but just think of the crippling impact such magical thinking has on poor blacks already underfed in intellect and atrophied in sense of agency how a seizure fascinates hangover cures of more drink distracted by hunger while your loved one whispers final words dragged from red-floor sleep in the hotel lobby out into the city winter failing on the path that was itself the compromise drives home how dumb it was to have gone down it, but only in a sense: there is still time to alchemize it eye-patches, limps, gimp hands, fucked up teeth maggot dumpster yoga-and-whiskey hipsters with Hitlerjugend hair and ukuleles sometimes the subject is not to be centered in the viewfinder condemning gay sex on grounds that it is not natural behavior even as you take “unnatural” drugs to avoid “natural” death business as usual (work, chores, meals) to deny the threat to business as usual thoughtful nods despite not knowing what was said white supremacists taking dance classes bus tours of the holy land for the Velcro-shoed in golf visors how do these vibrant flowers, vased between us at our table, color your claim that there is no hope? that squinched face faintly shifted off to the side, its lead eye clenched in recoil, as cigarette smoke tendrils up from the ember (hands busy elsewhere) sometimes the subject is not to be centered in the viewfinder condemning gay sex on grounds that it is not what most people do even as you practice the yabajar the twisting world of the pet fish, the world of its bowl, recedes in early morning hours to just some knick-knack on the shelf venomous sign language quarrels between parents can be ignored, but the constant accompaniment by the grunts of the deaf can warp a child’s brain his mother teary under a flamboyant hat, the man-child in diapers intensifies his Stevie-Wonder smiley swaying to the gospel of the deacon’s laying-on-of-hands healing pimp offices in twenty-four-hour laundromats night grass cool between bare toes why not grapple when all will come to nothing? masturbating to, licking, Christ’s side wound like a medieval hopefully one day soon we will facilitate, in our growing progress, more gay kids into sex transition than even Iran does! from homes that have them show up to school sullied, eye bags and sulky faces a guest over for dinner, the mother insists upon table manners ill-suited to the family’s squalor condemning gay sex on grounds that it is not natural behavior even as our bonobo ancestors are gay as hell
*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: McCrary and Branson’s famous Alligator Bait, which became a hot item everyone just had to have in the late 1800s—the Big Mouth Billy Bass (below) of its time!
