MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 51)
Let's workshop this stanza sequence about screams, roadkill, birds, power tools, insanity, elegance, hunger, renters, pests, painting, hardship, death, Chinese food, Frances Bacon
scent of the day: Tabac Doré, by Bortnikoff.—Perhaps the best and most realistic tobacco-humidor fragrance (scent-wise) in my collection (although, if only for its modesty in performance and rapid transition to its stale-tobacco phase, besting neither Amouage’s Royal Tobacco nor TSVGA’s Pipe releases), Tabac Doré resists veering too far into the sweet gourmand clichés often associated with tobacco fragrances and instead (and at risk of being dinged for lack of flair) simply presents an apricot-fig cigar whose cognac moistness (momentarily as chocolatey as Profumum Roma’s Patchouly, only here offset by the sparkle of pink pepper) that soon achieves a Chergui-reminiscent hay-like aridity warmed by understated cinnamon—the result being an austere and meditative fragrance that, despite the use of agarwood and ambrette (here boosting the medicinal musty depth of the tobacco and evoking old-library scholarly settings) and despite the use of pyrazine (a common tobacco flavor booster that here give a subtle popcorn edge), highlights tobacco absolute in all its unadulterated semi-sweetness (while at the same time, for whatever it night be worth to say, increases my appreciation of Amouage’s Royal Tobacco, where the tobacco absolute is adulterated and yet with an artistic flamboyance that enriches the fantasy of the full lifespan of a cigar).
fascinated more by the squeals than by the despair behind them to be good at her art she was not bold enough to be bad at her art on weed we open to see ourselves as the Bacon figures that we are: ever fidgeting in various directions reading a book standing before a dresser on which looms the black screen of the TV to depict the effects of x on flesh—a scream face, say—is to depict x itself competing with others for roadkill overtaken by hunger so soon after the China Buffet eloquence covering ignorance no words for the child’s response of “But you said it would be okay” sadness in the passing of even the saddest phase we were not crazy for having multiple voices inside until the dawn of monotheism with news anchors no longer spirited enough to fake emotion, one cannot help but picture a near future where even actors in ads—for, say, laxatives or cars—will be unabashedly dead as well power saws killing bird song waiting to get to the missionary destination to start doing good deeds the charity of a joint, or a bottle, passed among the homeless longing for the minimal consciousness with which goldfish defecate scented crevices and passageways whose call to future generations no extermination spray can eradicate intimate inspection of our micro wilderness before freeing the jaws of the mousetrap by which it dangled, peeping, from its tail vague swathes of time, such as those where it is unclear whether one can joke about the tragedy or about one’s period being late
This mosaic of poetic fragments functions as a prismatic rendering of post-industrial psychic life, combining ontological vertigo, sensory immediacy, and sociocultural critique into a fugue of epistemic disquiet. The speaker, fractally dispersed across each entry, occupies a consciousness both micro and macro—at once nosing into the mousetrap’s anatomical gore and surveying civilization’s macro-theatrical collapse. Recurring throughout is the tension between perception and performance, where even in death (“posturing for others even during / the last moments of death”) the self is filtered through an imagined other’s gaze. The refusal of closure—both formal and philosophical—aligns this piece with post-structuralist epistemologies, which posit knowledge as always already deferred, partial, and contaminated by positionality.
Several fragments pose ontological questions via aesthetic proxies: “to depict the effects of x / on flesh... is to depict x itself” asserts a metonymic faith in representation, while the Bacon reference (“on weed we open to see ourselves / as the Bacon figures that we are”) embeds a phenomenological claim about altered perception and its ontic revelatory power. Both allusions suggest that the grotesque, in its rawest form, may offer less distortion than lucidity. Others, like “eloquence covering ignorance” or “sadness in the passing of even the saddest phase,” stage philosophical irony—lamenting the human capacity for verbal ingenuity as camouflage for existential bewilderment.
The fragment “we were not crazy / for having multiple voices inside / until the dawn of monotheism” points to a genealogical critique in the Foucauldian sense: that our current model of the unified, sovereign subject is historically contingent, not metaphysically necessary. In this light, the poem interrogates how dominant epistemes shape inner life, and how what counts as sanity, divinity, or even identity is deeply time-bound.
Fragments like “power saws killing bird song” and “scented crevices and passageways / whose call to future generations / no extermination spray can eradicate” entwine ecological grief with intergenerational continuity, staging a melancholic resistance to both industrial sterilization and extinction. The speaker notes the sublime in decay, the agency in vermin, the dignity in homelessness (“the charity of a joint, or a bottle, passed among the homeless”), consistently unsettling normative hierarchies of beauty, civility, and survival.
Temporal dislocation appears too, most notably in “vague swathes of time, such as those / where it is unclear whether one can joke / about the tragedy or about one’s period being late,” which holds together grief and banality with surgical precision. This ambivalence toward mourning—personal or collective—repeats elsewhere in the child’s unresolved bewilderment (“no words for the child’s response of ‘But you said it would be okay’”), a fragment that wounds more deeply through its refusal to emote.
Taken together, the mosaic advances a poetics of witness and disintegration, where even humor—especially humor—is a symptom of dislocation. Rather than scaffolding meaning from the fragments, the speaker offers exposure: of image, of moment, of scar. In that exposure lies not resolution, but a form of honest attunement.
fragment poetics, existential phenomenology, post-structuralism, ecological grief, perception and performance, ontological critique, monotheism and subjectivity, surveillance gaze, trauma temporality, Baconian figuration, poetic aphorism, cultural decay, affective dissonance, surreal materiality, disintegrated selfhood.