MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 9)

Let's workshop this stanza sequence about masturbation, lack of intimacy, porn actors, bucks clouded in fantasy, anorexia anxiety, opportunistic leopards, blaspheming reality by believing in miracles

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handsy poltergeists run in the family 

light years more advanced but always crashing in Podunk

she mistook wanting to keep its father with wanting to keep the child

squirrels fall off branches

fictions already factor into, color, our assessment of what is real and what is fictional

the abortion loophole of threatening to kill yourself if you are not allowed it

infuriated with the person for dying

relief enough to numb existential dread

making up wonders blasphemes real wonders

watching your ninth-grade crush lean against a car—
a thug in a durag pushing thirty, squeezing her ass—
as you step on the yellow bus, plans dashed to walk her home

odd enough, the porn actor turns to PornHub
on his phone during a take five to restore
the rigidity required to complete the scene

a young buck trapped by his own antlers to rot between two trees—
the drunken rage of the rut having had him believing in his magic
as he tried to dash through a gap laughably narrow to sober eyes

the pity lies not in seeing sculpted faces and highways on Mars,
but in the conviction—akin to that of the cloud really being 
a giant hotdog—that they really are sculpted faces and highways!

old ladies rightfully imagining 
their mid-orgasm faces to be 
mistakable for medical emergency 

high-altitude balloons—platforms for weather measurement
along with espionage cameras and explosion sensors—can seem
saucer-like when seen from the ground in their glow of reflected light

priest blessings as cold and rote as depositing change in the bus fare box

googling “envelope glue calories" in setback anxiety

anticipatory nostalgia

the kid in the hippie commune begging for a GI-Joe

hopes and fears overriding the minimal skepticism

avoiding the doctor in fear of the number on the scale 

leopard guarding the baby deer, but only until its blooms into full meatiness

masturbating to his secret love letters

songs too evocative of your past to hear how they “really” sound

organizing your life around what readers 
would find entertaining, like dating
after your divorce instead of moping 

her suicide scrawl, returned by the police with no bedside manner,
passed down with each death: from her husband to her daughter, 
then to her unknown grandson and a host of strangers down the line

because some defensiveness was warranted
(at least in certain aspects of the particulars), 
she remained blind to the underlying criticism

thousands of bathers on the beach—
are they really not entangled 
in the same story?

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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.