MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 30)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about former pimps, fragile dreams, the desire to transfer one's burdens onto others, fly ballet, consumerist religion, lost memories, God welcoming our disbelief
the pale-blue-dot humor of even the worst brutalities a shit after a shower fragrant dreams of leaving, transfixing you in place violent body waxing, de-throbbing the tumescence writing in the dark comes out like speaking while deaf but new opportunities arise when playing tennis without a net undigested berries in bear shit Sunday church at the Mall of America it took another poet to see (let alone to appreciate) what he was up to—to tell those who should know better: “What do you think Dickinson was doing?” were thoughts of the so-called “astral plane” hazy visions of cyberspace pulling us—like teloi, like Kubrick’s monolith—to carve it out? out of all the wormhole bubbles of the quantum cradle prior to the Big Bang, the bubble that kept expanding— our universe—did so by the blow of a sufficient cause artists trained in workshops to play it safe, now especially for “vulnerable identities” episodes depicted in dog-eared books taken by you as what happened to you we are so anti-MLK today (and so pro the quackery that proliferates in climates of fear) that we think—no joke—we can discern a good deal about people not only by their skin-color, but by their astrological sign flies frenzied inside, their ricochets visceral against windowpanes you appear, and the boy digging his ass in the aisle pretends to itch his leg as wonderful as she remembered it to have been, and as many pictures—tangible and intangible—she still had, the widow could only sigh to think of all the Tuesday nights forgotten the narrow view of nature behind our tendency to say with pitiful sincerity, “That’s too strange to be a coincidence” how often throughout history has societal disapprobation thwarted love? flashlight and drawstring bag for nighttime dumpster dives wakes during rainstorms fill homes with the rank of feet all those priests of false religions (then, now, and to come) the one we know to be two-faced is of course never so with us that one slat of the blinds hard to flip in line with the others those metaphors no longer could power the culture a chance missed to tell someone what they mean to you silence wedging a distance acting as if pre-marriage dreams are what adults grow out of aware that you locked yourself out just as—no, just before—you shut the door comparing the second spouse with the first—a first idealized falsely, as the second will be glimpsing from your partner’s voice— cadence and timbre, words and references— the face on the other end of the line a mother and infant’s love bond across the aisle has him feel anchored despite organ-shifting turbulence but a creature of love who endowed you with the gift of reason would hope for you not to believe in him were proof lacking the pedestrian observing others in the street, not in his own world like the rest—he is the one plainclothes cops pick out to follow, unmarked cats yacking up hairballs pork fat in the pie crust calorie-conscious replacement of meals with liquor singing the unspeakable screaming the unspeakable how can you stare at the boundless sea, really stare, and still be possessive? we ought to pick up the hitchhiker, bedroll soaking in the downpour, for the very reason we refuse too we stay away from in-laws—sibling in-laws of our own sex, especially: the sight of them exposes the absurdity of our homosexual hate those wishing they could stick their extra pounds on passing waddlers, who would not even notice the change blind acceptance of the society aspersing our society for the same reason we do commercial publishers, but now even small presses, want work only from tokens or at least those who have made headlines a land of no tolerance for nuance, too boring not to be bludgeoned by the algorithm a land where politics supersedes principle a land whose iconic jeans and iconic x-y-z are imported from foreign countries a land of sloth, boredom, superstition, poverty, toxins, disasters, (scientific) illiteracy a land of histrionics driven to stand out as deep-radical-special-bullied-fearless a land of underdog-individualism where marginality, where fighting the man, is hip a land of anti-intellectuals craving cheap-lazy ways to goals: fad-diets, get-rich quick a land of philistines in frantic struggle against their heart’s murmur: no grand point a land of equity where all thoughts are worthy and laymen scoff at Einstein a land of such resent for genius that anyone can be a genius in anything overnight a land of interneters trying to make sense of an indifferent chaosmos where lives end a land of citizens made insular and unwise by stories of how it is blessed exceptional a land of citizens so mollycoddled that they fake-need puppies to pet if discomforted a land of pc-reactivism as well as quack-science and dunderheaded conspiracies think of how it once was: elementary friendships across racial lines repressed by the time of middle-school cafeterias after a drawn-out midlife-crisis apology for pimping her out back then, she asks if you could connect her to any clientele a heavy-duty church pole on top of which a jumbotron flaunts in grainy pixels Old Glory fluttering, sometimes even with wind-snapping audible to pedestrians below treasuring those chances to take your time on the path home, while still grateful for the times when duty demands haste how could we live with ourselves if we let the quality, the caliber, of our art drop and yet not as well our standard, our taste?
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: mentalfloss.com/article/60401/emily-dickinson-scandalous-spinster
When some of your longer pieces (I.e Made For You..., White Supremacy Death bed etc.) are put together in their entirety, they’ll be some of my all time favorites, from any artist. Awesome stuff!