MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 47)

Let's workshop this stanza sequence about anorexia, pain-pill addicts, love anxiety, homeless hopes, sailors returning to shore, letters home from the frontline, seatbelts in the 90s, cancel culture

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touring open houses for the medicine cabinets

a story lost in the ink bleed of rain

aware of her presence only from her warmth

the radio playing in a room all night, no one there

fingers interlocked, but wondering if the grip is one of habit or heart

tethered by fake threads like stars in a constellation

trees give us a mirror: amputations healing just like ours

a nightly hope for his socks to dry by morning

hyperbole to incite action used to turn off academics 

strawberry face cyst regenerates soon after drainage

so many deckhands, forced by tight quarters 
into the intimacy of long-voyage secrets, weep
in silence as the port of conclusion draws near

early 90s seatbelts pulled sly across our laps
as we order our children to do the same
with harsh whispers, the cop car tailing us

pampered by success-affording leisure, that hope
gambols in most minds now, lowest and highest:
that hope to die before experiencing the collapse

underclass artists adopting minimalism 
to decrease the odds of embarrassment
under scrutiny by the cultured world

an organ of human society funded 
to preserve knowledge and abilities
outsourced to artificial intelligence

seated, alongside the uniformed members 
you have grown attached to over decades,
at a ceremony to mark the group’s dissolution

when times get tough we see a rise
in swindlers—hallowed grounds,
even ivory towers, are not immune 

victim culture (to have been unsettled is to have been traumatized) plus
cancel culture (to have traumatized is to deserve ruin)—a recipe for easy As
when colleges run on the business slogan “the customer is always right”

are we nearing a time when we would fire 
the sweet librarian merely for shelving a book
whose statistics “invalidate our lived experience”?

a placated boss

bathless kids at school without socks

calm satiety after a thorough cry

another sudden innocent urge to Google whether you are loved

reaching the level where people bother to hate you

letters home from war, blacked out in parts

nuclear power plants in towns that would rather eat than have serenity

acting as if ruined merely by hearing the news that rape has occurred in history,
then wanting to ruin the professor of such news—that reeks of the same cologne
worn by evangelicals who rage against gays: different choirs, same hymnbook

it would be bad enough to rage at the rain each time
it made you wet, even as you always refuse to carry 
an umbrella—but colleges are actually waterparks!

like a sailor scouting stars, she scans 
for navigational points of affection—
every gesture a clue to decipher

finding him to be there
only when hearing
one’s breathing double

with the ur-pleasure bound up
in seeing your child eat, imagine
the ur-pain of seeing it anorexic

in her story, a spellcaster feared 
for his harnessing of dark magic
became the last hope to save the light 

incensed at the poet for his “unsettling” paintings,
and understandably so: their inspiration is a world 
we hate to see, especially because we are its nurturers

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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.