MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 48)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about rainbow geysers, cocaine on record sleeves, gemstones, compost heaps, dirty industries, lying, crack dealers, trans boys, rune casting, temp agencies
rainbows in geyser spray outshone by field-trip giggles over packed lunch pre-dawn conversations punctuated by sniffs of record-sleeve lines an overgrown cigarette ash between unaware fingers bates our breath one leaf left on the autumnal branch elk calls in the early quiet clear glasses of saltwater make a blue sea those who cannot see that hunters can be sincere conservationists warm steam from the compost heap in the birdsong chill of spiderweb dew gemstones on black velvet, their facets reflecting medieval torchlight stream water in a tin cup, still babbling tales of snowcaps and ancient stones beneath screams of shortsighted industry stomach growling before the family grave, the man whispers—but without really fathoming—“I will go here in my time” ice changes the taste of beer, ruins it, just as freezing ruins the taste of lettuce if caught in a lie, just insist that at the time you were trying to break your intrusive obsession with ensuring that everyone know the truth we feel insulted to hear the artist describe his early work, so adored by us, as “crap” especially because we take him to be wiser now a deer captivated by its reflection in a puddle of an overgrown parking lot let bones, ligaments, tendons take the weight of the shoulders reversing a lifetime of poor posture trusting the shape to emerge from the chiseled stone cameras click as the guide points, but enthusiasm slants toward the gift shop that hour for promenading the main street of the hood and posting up on its corners desire being so often mimetic—“I want that toy,” “I want her,” because he does—serves as a check against venturing too far: evolution is conservative refusing to face our death, to believe it creeps from a non-eternity away, despite all the funerals attended address book full at ninety five, but few left to receive his calls a crack corner, not just starting from dusk abandoning the scientific theory prematurely, as too audacious to be true feigning enlightenment by denigrating alpha behavior while overplaying your struggles with trying to nurturing beta qualities not training close to the fight in fear of how such behavior might affect his self-assurance since he might unconsciously read it as desperate aging agony about what is to become of her man-child, slobbering always and moan-moaning, when she dies temp agency code words that allow for screening with self-deceptive delicacy: brownies, chili peppers, egg whites selecting should be seen as emphasizing, perhaps even overemphasizing— but not as lying the vision of her masterpiece gathering dust, pauses the sculptor’s hand she was too “intuitive” to welcome, or even recognize, the exceptions underworld slang obscuring the trade even from the ears of the traders an indirect way to feign being strong and virile is to condemn being strong and virile, and then stress how much you struggle to be what amounts to the opposite we have knee-jerked too far from our rune-casting ancestors if today we are not allowed to pre-judge—let us move away, instead, only enough that there be no shock if we are wrong the trans boy, self-described as mis-bodied, is not inconsistent in holding that gender is a construct while also treating his “boyness” as a given: he feels, after all, aligned with traits that society—infiltrating him since the womb—deems basic to “boyness”
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.