MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 3)
Let's workshop this mofo!
only the cross tattoo keeping you Christian painting the nuances of hood life through poetry meant for friends and family too soaked in hood life to give a damn about, or even understand, poetry writing down a friend’s home address on your applications, because no one gets on the books from where you sleep her good characteristics she cut with bad deeds to stop repulsing people to hold eye-contact or not to hold eye-contact with doorstep carolers rather than her real lyrics “I feel like I'm on dope,” sing “I feel like raping goats” (or maybe “throats”) in the seductive style of Aaliyah’s “Rock the Boat” “I fucked up” reliably meant for her, coming of age in this cyber age, “I touched myself to him (again)” drinking your wages direct knowledge of how many die alone, their terminal struggles among piles of stuff unseen, urges us to share more—smile more black for anal, sex notches in the form of rubber bands around middle-schooler wrists feeling bad in pointing out flaws in others makes pointing out flaws in others satisfying singsong and babbling to eclipse remembrances of blunders bygone the bum, although sallow and slouched with the rest under the overpass, shines with manifest keenness about the eyes born with issues retirement beard conservationists dunking gulls in a sea of crude; abolitionists writing freed-slave narratives (sell it!) (sell it!) easing into the market: scribal fonts in the first printed books; buggy shapes in the first motor cars mild autistic traits not at home in your name hiding bouts of hunger-retching kids sent to school without breakfast forging the forgeries of the famous forger a full-body carwash with the gas-station squeegee bareback in the laundromat, small talk in wait Christmas-day strip joint older each day as we watch her remain forever young a land where teary white “progressives,” the rape-eye-blocking scarf their metonym, are “terribly saddened,” “perturbed,” to see Mexicans, for example, okay with—even honored by—whites wearing their garb our era’s drive for pill-popping control, each of us striving to be a sanctuary cut away from the complex continuum of forces elemental, is embodiheralded by those circles autistic children—prophets of sorts—tend to crayon hard around their self-portraits just because we come at things from our own angles and interests does not mean we find in things only what we first put into them goosebumps and held-back tears when “Eye of the Tiger” booms between each Amway speaker great feats of prescience build up after years of guesses, most of which we must forget to preserve our faith plastic taped around windows for winter (pulled back just far enough for the ac to fit for summer) that hangdog look of wasting soon after gastric bypass— head too large for the body
*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.
Painting: Interior with Ida in a White Chair, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1900)