MADE FOR YOU AND ME 1: hive Being (Stanzas 2016—part 8)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence, which includes cartires over turtles, sex trauma triggering early puberty, firefighters prying open the doors of the dead, and flattering doctors to avoid bad news
the best evidence of white supremacy being alive and well is the lie that it is art from those who have never fucked up big time fathers blandished into sand burial at the beach free associations diverging around the globe baby showers proven to come too early night paths to female slave quarters finding one’s voice in vandalism sails gone flaccid on their masts yelling to work up your nerve tire tests of turtle armor commemorating failure burn-barrels for trash wrecked by success mangled guardrails corner hangabouts environmental exposures, often helped by fatback and sex trauma, will sprout hair on the playing field even at seven all it takes is a cop’s label (“roach slum”), or a stranger’s look of disgust, to notice— as if for the first time—where you live playing with old toys, after having just gotten the new one, to prove the new excitement will remain having achieved your life’s goal, sacrificing health and family for it, all to find waiting not happiness but a bed hard to leave being comfortable in who you are transcends bodily asymmetry daycare soil liquefied by seismic shaking yet another report of foul odors; yet another apartment door jimmied open by firefighters dumpster-diving for unfinished tubes of oil paint the facet of hilarity in end-of-life preparation dark nooks known only to janitors vigils for teens late for curfew truck stop drag queens signs for free dirt logic klutzes who let the fact that “bad mother” has long been code for “independent wife” convince them they are not bad mothers might this forest Genesee can, turned up from digging, have been from someone known to us: relatives—ourselves even? less a package of conscience than one of saving face, the great white parachute descends upon the refugees in wait a pungent musky-piney-skunky surge of smoke tumbles across the dash and up the windshield to the ceiling, finally to the back toward you— blue-dyed water undulating through the mineral oil of an ocean in a bottle the soldiers preferred the factory precision of Hanes, but they knew that the knitting of socks for soldiers was more for the knitter’s sake than for their own air pockets trapped under boats; mercury on tables adjusting the blanket on the purring child as do TV dads fathers flexing their biceps, close up for little faces, hoping to earn a boost (knowingly unwarranted) loving again someone with whom we had spent a lifetime, someone whom we had then stopped loving for a lifetime— that chance, given radical life extension, is on the horizon voting in line with what you would like to be true, not with what benefits you in your circumstance, is not so laughably idiotic as it is trite to say it is lost in permanent abstraction bum beards heavy with rime altering memories to suit one’s current needs fawning doctors to ward off crushing news
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: charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article235218592