MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 29)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about vagina beer, Bin Laden shirts, yogic flying, offerings to the gods, breasts engorged with milk, old yearbooks, the privilege of being an "oppressed identity"
different is normal when you grow up with it vaginal yeast from supermodels as beer seed gas moved along by kicks from the womb puzzled about how to approach sex without alcohol arm tattoos to mark vehicles of the disease fitted sheet: the curve-ball to neat folding not wanting racism to go away, good as it is for comedy when yogic flying turns out to be just hideous hopping the urge to see the body of the dead loved one yes, even after death the knife still cuts are you still keeping it together, or are you lying? expected to behave prior to tenure (meaning not make claims too controversial in your field) even though youth is perfect for precisely that! let those who have the highest stacks of so-called oppression, those who win the oppression Olympics (and so always have something external to blame for their screwups), speak first how come t-shirts that elevate Bin Laden have not spread with us like those of Manson, Che Guevara? signs of due diligence that they are, c-sections avert malpractice suits pilfering the offerings to the gods all these years, you start to wonder whether you might be one of them the sudden deathbed realization that you are not home, the place where you grew up as a child bitter enough to unload the full magazine at the gravestone censoring horrors to pretend they do not exist the trick is to build anecdotes around the lie self-milking into the sink so baby can latch teeth clenched through the night from stink breath items stored away from past marriages she parks in different spaces so any one of us might be to blame for her oil spots what traumas lie dormant in the grainy archive that is a school yearbook? pretending not to see the trap set for us is to lull the opponent into holding there to be no need to plan further a grievance held throughout one’s life about something untrue may stand in, nonetheless, for something else true the ease with which you can ignore doubt when your very identity and standing are built up around that which you doubt the artist kept sticking his dissident head out, inviting the Sauron eye of a federal agency that could find any one of us guilty in its audit fires in metal drums it does not matter what “oppressed identities” say (whether it makes sense, whether it is dangerous): as oppressed, they deserve the first and last say unless it is just a flagrant ploy to enforce certain norms and values over others— if one student is allowed to opt out of an assignment just because it triggers her, any student should be allowed to opt out of any assignment that triggers her diagnostic categorization of a psychological condition, especially when that condition is a stigma, can do more harm than good if the condition involves no major disruption to the patient’s goals or relationships in a manner unaligned to those goals or relationships pockets where people use dark actions to feel justified in performing good ones, not the other way around those for whom motel weeks are not thought to be a downgrade, but rather a splurge: shower, bed, TV, and thoughts of big changes sudden reluctance to beat the record set by the dead father with whom you have communed through all these years of training to do so the weight of each cost and of each benefit of learning from the masters of the past depends on your constitution and its goals teens have long felt pressure to join some (seemingly) alternative circles (in our era, ones based around commercial products), but now they feel pressure to go beyond mild maiming into hormones and sex surgeries (soon perhaps as accessible as tattoos) since any white claiming a right to an opinion is a white supremacist, luckily identity is now a subjective affair immune to the violence of pushback, in which case whites— if the subjectivity folks are playing fair—can disown the race assigned to them at birth eying your preschool photo amazed that it is you, sad for what the kid will go through— why do you wish to see his underwear? the shiver after urination in a train wobble-swayed like in the womb the illiberals of today no longer cloak their lust for power with justifying rhetoric: they squelch so-called “privileged voices” merely because those voice are privileged— yes, even if that privilege (when not just a lie) comes from talent and hard work given the prostate g-spot of male fear, no wonder many find themselves probed in the fever dreams of alien abduction how can death come, think some in fear of an empty nest, to those with dependents around? people used to go to college precisely to be unsettled, to grow: we have failed as parents, teaching—as a key axiom of our ethos of comfort über alles—that personal feelings reveal objective truth skin sloughs off the waterlogged corpse— the year old sweet potato the hard-shell nose of the bike saddle to get a pussy itch leg on the chair rung, casual—breeze up shorts against her swamp sucking at her innards in each direction he sees intricate webs of blue unable to get it up for the dolphin in frigid waters where someone could walk by the dock any moment wanting credit for good deeds seeing your friends in your spouse’s pictures young dependents serving as permission slips to go on after the death of a loved one chicken laid out on the grates of an A&P shopping cart, grilling over a trash fire publicists pushing clients to divorce their spouses for the sake of an image putting “phobic” to the end of a group as a strategy to shut down criticism of it—or even, in those cases egregiously manipulative, to punish those who fail to praise it enough
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: eatinnovation.com/vaginal-beer-no-consumption/