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
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
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.
Can’t wait for this to be published in its entirety