MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 45)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about fentanyl, Plato, foreign languages, execution, dogs, symptoms, illness, coffee, wintertime, ancient manuscripts, love, manipulation, anal rape
scent of the day: Opus XI, by Amouage. A green-aromatic sibling to several woodleather fragrances in my collection that give off a bandaid impression (the more antiseptic and boozy Guilty Absolute by Gucci and the more knuckle-dragging Duro by Nasomatto), Opus XI—right now my least favorite of the three (although arguably the best blended)—opens with a slightly medicinal marjoram and settles into a potentially nose-blinding accord of animalic suede (which is a function of designer-like oud and sweet styrax resin).
will you at least put the tarp down before you hang yourself? donkey erections tap the street like a blind man’s cane the artist never knows when he is not creating repeated checking for symptoms itself taken as a symptom once-great cities vulgarized by tourist amenities making him do the crime and then catching him for it as if shouting will make up for the difference in tongue rummaging dumpsters for fentanyl patches to suckle on—hope, an addiction much older: that arterial system, distending over here when dashed over there, feeding the very addictions that families ambush with desperate interventions victories, largely in part due to rhetorical technique (plus color of skin and tone of voice), seduced him over time into really believing he was correct if your being ashamed meant his being so, the rapist would not call to see if you would like to go out again indifferent to one another, less as if we were never children than as if angry for failing to be Plato cautioned against cultivating debate skills at too young an age, fearing skepticism might take root either as an end in itself or as just a for-hire sword to slay the “other side” rather than as a precious chisel to carve out the truth flannelled men coughing at dirty jokes on the dock sipping Styrofoam coffee a dog waiting outside a corner store warped ridges of dissolving scum left on shore with each wavelet families harmonizing in song before the screen the first smoky breath of the season scruples about the humane way to execute an enemy she finally appears in her dreams as the fat woman she has been pain drugs, bureaucracy said, were too habit-forming to give to the dying man however much the ruins might be tame simulations of what was, they echo the same; the natives look the same a forgotten gospel papyrus sitting for decades in a safety deposit—that seems so dramatic, but even that is all too human just like the old coins in the next box over rejecting the grievance on grounds that anal penetration is impossible without lubrication vacancies in the skyscraper wanting love to free you to compromise yourself fancy innards (surround-sound systems, marble, high ceilings) in rural homes mere boys puffing cigars in boating shoes and salmon polos bruising the lovers body—a hickey is common—as a sign of passion toward it and ownership of it towns where always with an edge of good cheer but no matter where— diner, school, church, bar, grocery store, home, haunted hayride— the sudden smell the fart will never go unaddressed each time he came in from the garage, his animation was conspicuous—intensified further by his struggle to hem himself in, effort that concentrated the fury (like gas on the verge of forming a star): first to the living room, and finally to just the chair