MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 41)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about hallucinating drug addicts, Amway, the Amazon rainforest, feminine energy, Silly Putty, peeling potatoes, pizza oil, Robert Tepper’s “No Easy Way Out"
so-called “atheists” unable to shoot loads on Mexican Virgin candles waiting for the mare’s tail to swing far enough to the side insane enough to be invulnerable to blackmail the bridge she is burning would have rotted no longer able to bear public insult a judge’s death sentence the witch burns before her children college slut grade-school teacher the protracted infiltration of tree roots through the earthen wall of the cellar, through the corks of the wine bottles the endless feasting slaughter each Earth rotation, hyperbolized in any square mile of the Amazon loose change withheld from bums because their cardboards are too witty to indicate genuine desperation yelling, after an out-of-the-blue doubletake of alarm, to the druggie who always thinks spiders are on him: “Yo, Dude! Step the fuck back with those spiders!” a Dickensonian sign of greatness in a poet, a sign by no means surefire, is radical gaps in “success” between poems indicative of experimental effort it is silly for you, insisting on your habit, to abstain from workshops teaching—or is it guiding now?—the new way: if you go, at least you will be able to put on a lip-service show of the new way you refuse to adopt merely an imaginary watcher might be publicity enough for you still to be giving out of vanity “the border between dead and alive,” he said, “is so hard to pinpoint because being alive is a form of being dead—and vice versa” we are special ones: nature takes man down each moment, but when man—slaughterer of cattle—takes man down it is a “crime” we often speak of the weakness of giving into uprooting temptation, short-changing the strength it might take to give into them: fidelity, for instance, is sometimes a euphemism for fear of change sometimes he feels he could be a sage unmoved by opinion, but when he imagines even the merest street boy hating him (for whatever reason) he buries his frustration with work lacking as it does the “feminine” vibration of vulnerability, our culture hammers us deep into premature certainty is art intended to scare to be disparaged as much as art intended to edify? Silly Putty is still around, and yet little chance there is anymore—and that chance dwindles each day—to capture faces in the newspaper if the surge in grandparent death during finals week is from stress over grandchildren acing the exams (what else?), then perhaps grandparents ought to be left in the dark attempting to erase one’s blackness through rectitude willing to let them ruin her, these were her most-inner values clouds on the wall above the kitchen trash—peeling potatoes triumphs counterbalanced by despair on the way to defeat “you will easily accept shit if you don’t think you’re entitled” tattooed hairlines oils coating the surfaces of pizza and espresso promise goodness toothbrushing a Pollock on the bathroom mirror in the fever of sunburn, the fever of back lashes, eyes rove in search of distraction stoicism is the battle against what has us toilet paper the glory hole between stalls before someone enters and what has us abstain when someone’s already there when the push for diversity tips over to shaming those who strive to be typical the company behind such and such logo or behind, say, Cheetos— such trivia we have down pat (and yet differentiating between, say, maple and poison ivy leaves is an entirely different matter) will there be a movie in the Rocky franchise, perhaps Apollo Creed’s child or grandchild (a girl would be best), where the final fight takes place in virtual reality? that single nail from which the shutters dangle those who leap, as opposed to step, off the roof “Success isn’t owned, it’s rented,” says the Diamond Ambot, the drums opening on Robert Tepper’s “No Easy Way Out” those who write marginalia in the books of insurrection instead of taking to the streets unraveling his terminology for the layman had the specialist flustered—like a parent defining basic words for the inquisitive child
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.
