MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 17)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence, which includes anorexia, missing kids, prisoners, cosmetics to bait, earthquakes, NWA, soldiers running trains on villagers, floods, cheating grandma in cards
selfies with the beached humpback lunch in the shade of a gas pump years now after the tween went missing, her mom still honors the privacy of her diary generations of personal histories more and more built just of screen reruns jiggling unlocked locks after knocks ruffling newspapers in the stall after someone enters the bathroom an expensive resting place, but it has a view those memories now noticeably crumbled hungry, grass and bark stand out in a new light at your high school reunion your successes—degrees, prestige— still proved to be no matter pretending to take in forks of salad in anorexic circles, but of course making the pretending conspicuous displeasure derived from the good fortunes of others engagements undermined by STDs shackled up from ankles, knees, waist, and each other chainsaws revving and buzzing after the storm a land where the gathering is wrong, unjust, if there are not enough blacks in it cosmetics, although seen through soon enough, buy time for the other to find strengths that eclipse the flaws—but so too does lying about your career phasing through liquids and metals too, waves (high-pitched) have dogs howl in ache over a minute before structures crumble from The Big One in a barn, forsaken long ago, the hair of the nude is coiled tight around a rifle bayonet NWA bumping through an anachronistic boombox during that barn train: “She only fourteen and a ho, but the bitch suck dick like a specialized pro!” frisson from the Paraguayan’s whistling the morgue sheet rising below the navel sober socials rats belly-up in the flood current how a smile alters one’s voice waiting for her to come of age from when she could barely walk tanned by sun, not from trying; strong from work, not from gym— indefinite, intangible differences unable to remember the places, the people, we had insisted would never be forgotten what makes the past sweet no matter how sad (confinements and beatings even) is that there was good too—and your days have dwindled were there such a thing as insanity, would completely unfounded hope—say, the lifer’s hope of release—be a good sign? friction resulting from the two being on different levels of outness who is more erotic than a blues guitarist? incensed by the cliché “schoolings” of the charlatan wise one’s one clean shirt “screwing up” Mars like we “screwed up” Earth a rubber toy to bite for withdrawal since the man rather be dead than dying, his family did not regret not having insisted on a hospital when the fever flowered that precious hour when children find the vacuity, the futility, of their games to extend outward—and outward wanting out of the suicide already too far in: hanging, the desk just beyond foot’s reach grandma would not care that you cheat her in cards is it ironic to be livid when people do not detect your irony? generic wax crayons—what oil-based cheese slices are to milk-based tripwire guns to stop grave robbers telemarketing for adult toys packed in tight on beaches as uncommunicative as workday elevators resigned workers sway with the bus, this way and that, while tourists—tense through the city—remain alert and erect wondering whether it would seem prudish to drop-cloth the place in plastic and give out gift bags of condoms for each orgy member
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: ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/rot-in-peace-sites-lacking-for-whale-corpses-amid-die-off-1.4476231?cache=