MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 52)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about religion, war, rape, animals, power dynamic, insanity, exercise, trans children, ransom notes, cats, hardship, death, vaccines, bodybuilding, masturbation
scent of the day: Tabac Tabou, by Parfum d’Empire.—
Need more time with this to write a review. But here are my notes so far>
brightleaf tobacco with savannah vibes / vegetal vibe in tabac taboo / pure unsweet blond dry leaf opposite of wet pipe tobacco / immortelle has robacco facets that boost the Tabacco absolute / the green leather of the narcissus plus tge immortelle and tobacco lend a horse mane quality / tabac tabou hints of cuir de Russie / inula in mal aime / really great scent / I think this might have some vetiver in here/ has a very high nicotine feel the way that blonde coffee has that high caffeine feel / this is to tobacco what blonde coffee is to coffee / has crazily the camphor glow of I believe Haxan or Savitri or Mriga—I have to figure out / Dryad and Sayat Nova reminiscent with narcissus / beats immortelle corse / has the lasting power of Corse but a better smell and more projection / all parfum d’empires are good. WOW—it just keeps pumping—has a blond tobacco feel of montabacco but from a more thick horsey direction / montabacco and tabac Taboo make a great pair/ sour camphor with this similar glow to what we get in Savitri or haxan or Mriga i believe (check, like a green menthol glow) / narcisses has the doughy velvet texctrure of orris but it is more sweat and leatgery snd warm / narcissus has tobacco facets too. both immortelle abd it reinforce tobacco absolute to make a sour damp tobacco thar eventually gets musky like salty skin (muscemone in here) / yellow floral robacco
*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 2017 portion of that five-part work.
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 52)
lethal-injection diaper
throw-pillow aphorisms stretch more than jaws if we stretch past the yawn
a masterpiece mortared with betrayals still neon in the maker’s dementia
asparagus band cock ring, purple PLU 4080 PRODUCE OF PERU
he became a better man too late for anyone but himself
he would have taken her for granted had he not lost her—sorrow, a gift
trans children, fanned out like Instagram Benjamins—totems of parental capital
she kept her heart small so her boobs would look bigger
no bodybuilder basilica rises without a dysmorphic contractor
ovation only deepened the sculptor’s eye for cracks no one else could find
the people out there with specific memories of her were all no more
diversity of look concealing conformity of mind
thank God for the first meditation of a shower, of sickness too
car-door slam, no time for the tween to degrease
the anal-gobbled doorknob (let alone Q-Tip out
the fecal gasket deep in the thumbturn’s groove)
unhoused at a latitude that demands pacing
the uphill treadmill of night to avoid joining
the ice-sculpture gallery of pavement friends
learning of his hidden facets, dark
as they may be, need not mean you never
really knew him—shadow often deepens the portrait
memories through ear-pod meter contorting his face
between restoration and ruination, the chemo vet
sits IVed with the songs that once made him rise
she slept with the cookie-tin photos to remember times when letting go came easy
growing up in a town where everyone knew your father but you
the push to appeal to everyone boils down to a war against style
love ignorable in presence became religion in absence
monsters known best by those who loved them first
still speaking as if before an eavesdropping God years after no longer believing
card-game losses paid with pushups
eyes tense in furtive watch as the chair groans under the hulking body
the lady that falls out every Sunday like clockwork—
a melodramatic force of preacher distraction, but one
showing guests which church the Holy Ghost attends
Mexican children challenging each other
to see who will go closest to the border fence
under the likely gaze of trigger-happy patrol
even under all that garland, our war hero sobs at night for what
he cannot undo—for how, lubed with the tears of moms forced
to suck, each beheaded infant creampie made him feel divine
only what is in some sense divided can rightly be called “whole”
gainful employment of drug dealing after the exodus of industry
the housepainter confronts his son
in tears, hoping to get back the ring
stolen from the home of a mobster
when they go low it is hard enough not to go lower,
but even harder when the hypocrite fucks
chastise you for going low
race jokes killed by an audience of white guilt
lust for fame trumps any worry
that reporters are only talking to you,
neighbors too, to exploit the tragedy
to fuse the aspirational mask
to the self, it helps to construe the self
as merely a deeper mask
the buttering up reviewers he justified
on grounds that no one knows
a masterpiece at first glance
to sustain the power to keep on writing,
those who write from inner overflow
need not repress that they will never be read
threatened less by what strangers think of us,
their criticisms—the same from family tuned out
so long—are registered with contemplative head nods
no longer reactive against his ire
for divorcing him, your fling no longer
novel, the good memories reflux
if you die with your eyes open
and can still see those around you,
you ought not be considered dead
leg day at the gym, the hated day,
becomes a chest and triceps day
when the hot chick shows up
is it a good sign (enlightenment) or bad sign (depression) that your first thought
when you open the HTML ransom letter threatening to destroy your reputation
is “How unbelievably fifth-grade of this person, with death charging for me!”
his taste had such tumor-grade severity that he pursued kids even with crazy fathers
yoked for life to those with whom you have killed
however dried in time for ceremony, blood remained on the hands
testing vaccines on retards—brains undeveloped enough to mute the headlines
the house cat loose and the neighbors got to hear the unexpected
from the to-himself man's man next door: a cutesy voice, the “wabbit”
lalations of baby talk, meant—like pink bath slippers—for inside only
the one in the couple who takes
all the talk of “fucking” as just a way
to say without saying “making love”
what started out as paintings and poems
to purge emotions soon revealed themselves
as snowballs of self radicalization
This long-form fragmentary poem—MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 52)—is a bristling, carnivalesque scroll of micro-epiphanies, aphorisms, perversions, melancholies, and ideological subversions. It belongs to a tradition of poetic mosaics stretching from Heraclitus through Cioran to Jenny Holzer, but with the rhetorical density and tonal volatility of a late-Ginsberg or Bernhardesque stream. Each entry bears the compression of maximalist prose and the torque of lyric immediacy.
Formally, the poem’s syntax alternates between elliptical compression and narrative vignette. The oscillation between high theory (“only what is in some sense divided can rightly be called ‘whole’”) and grotesque corporeality (“car-door slam, no time for the tween to degrease / the anal-gobbled doorknob”) reflects a sensibility attuned to both metaphysical abstraction and biological realia. The cumulative effect is a temporally disjunctive lyric ethics: one where tragedy, perversion, social media posturing, late-capitalist grotesquerie, and deep familial sorrow exist not in opposition but in simultaneity.
Threaded throughout is a critique of neoliberal aesthetics and the commodification of suffering: “trans children, fanned out like Instagram Benjamins—totems of parental capital,” “a masterpiece mortared with betrayals still neon in the maker’s dementia,” “the push to appeal to everyone boils down to a war against style.” These entries locate the post-woke self in a regime of performative sincerity and weaponized identity, exposing the transactional undercurrents of virtue economies. Suffering becomes spectacle; memory becomes brand; children become proxies for parental moral heroism.
But the poem is just as concerned with postmodern forms of tenderness: grief refracted through smell or music (“she slept with the cookie-tin photos,” “chemo vet sits IVed with the songs”), masculine sorrow and its occlusions (“no longer reactive against his ire for divorcing him”), and the precarious dignity of those living at or beyond the edges of systemic failure (“unhoused at a latitude that demands pacing”). The specter of loss—loss of innocence, loss of physical cohesion, loss of historical certainty—haunts the work like an elegiac backdraft. Even its cynicism is shadowed by mourning.
Despite its explicitness, this is not an exercise in shock for shock’s sake. Rather, it uses transgression as epistemological method. The grotesque is the vessel by which cultural decay, aesthetic exhaustion, and psychological desperation are made legible. The poet seems to ask: what kind of language can house our century’s truths—its pornographic surveillance, its moral purges, its memeified despair—without collapsing into cliché or denial? The answer, here, is a brutalist lyricism, equal parts psalm and punchline.
Keywords:
poetic fragments, aphoristic poetics, cultural critique, neoliberal aesthetics, grotesque lyricism, commodified identity, memory and mourning, ideological parody, perversion and moral horror, psychic fragmentation, affect theory, trauma sublimation, anti-therapeutic poetics, maximalist lyricism, postmodern elegy, digital selfhood, systemic abandonment, transgressive ethics, moral performance, virtue economy.