outside voices

Part of you hopes the world will stay this way:

(ending) —

because you’ve already trained for the apocalypse all your life

under a different trademark —

serial softdrink and tv rolling, rolling, rolling

so you can hardly hear the house moaning

under it all — disharmonious partially the wind.

Nobody wanted to get up on a standard spiral morning

to a bleak black ink world

watch life pass from a flat prison between the marginalized and the profit margin

spreading antiseptic margarine on two-dimensional

(characters)

bread

(blood).

No one ever asked to work for a living, when everyone

was living, because living

is easy when you’re working

on your life and not squeezing it into the juicer

of someone else’s

life so someone else

can drink blink-black ink lemonade

not hear the shriek-sigh-scritchdown as millions of voices flush down

the throat with no face attached.

This is business, the inside voices say,

and the outside voices are relegated in rainy doghouse

because who wants to hear them anyway?

“Wants”

this is because lj said so.

trying:

to be happy

seaglass

to feel safe in my own skin

a collage of arms around in a circle

sunglasses i won’t ruin

colors, the past and the future

safety in bits

between rooms of blue and gray

or should i call them boxes

less should

less negative

less i don’t want more i do love

what i already have

more art

doing art

watching/listening/reading art and just being in awe and just letting it fill me like sunset down the throat not worried or jealous or rushing just happy

sunset again at the top of masada

the ocean to stay like pretty child believing eyes

stop the hurt

stop the shame, guilt, terror

dream

then wake up and follow them

feel right, like i’m doing the right thing, being the right thing, that my body is safe and all right. preferably get validation from outside but yuck that’s gross i don’t want to need it

and maybe i don’t want it even

a new tablet to animate

to animate — bring things to life — who wouldn’t want to do that? and no, mom, i don’t yet know what form that comes in, because music can breathe life words can breathe life pictures unpictures all kinds of breathing of life can and none of us can breathe life like chlorophyll/god/G/s but

the human thing

to rest on a soft cushioned place in sun or maybe a little forest pocket carved out just for your childhood whims

reading with a cat in your lap

and being only here and there but not over there

and happy. mostly to be happy.

X2519

They call him the Master, but it’s really his assistant Eve who steals the show every time. Unicycling before the pregnant curtains tenderizing the audience for his grand arrival, she pulls out all the stops & makes the organ waltz with the crystal carousel horses as amber-trapped hopes and silver snowflakes clatter to the floor from mysterious buckets up above in the wings. By the time all the dead-of-winter flowers have flamed, they’re setting, and the stage is dark already when he arrives, effectively a redundancy, an irrelevant loose end. But he is still needed, for without him the audience would swell with fizzling scintillant stars & nowhere to put them; the whole theater would burst, a golden champagne firework.

Image: “Un arbre de Noël installé dans une maison française (1975).” By Jpbazard Jean-Pierre Bazard – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5777395

a sort of reverse aubade or something

:)? Either way i’d like to

There’s a starving dog next door named Willow with big brown eyes that kiss yours when she looks into them &

hear your voice

my songwriting teacher thinks i suck at songwriting &

telling me anything

Daniel’s friend’s fourteen-year-old sister’s on life-support with flooded lungs &

even wordless just

someone played a Bach concerto with rubber chickens &

to let me be

i’ve been carrying the warm soft words you gave me like a hermit crab’s quilted shield over my head, but i fear my claws, in holding on so tightly, will crumble them &

useful. is that a selfish thing

i shouldn’t have sent it &

i’m asking? i thought i had good intentions but maybe

some leather stars prefer their worm roommates to food &

but either way all i wanted really was

i just wanted you to know that i love you

to love and to be

loved

right

¿

Upon a rhetorical question you hope to God I don’t answer

Like all my problems,

this one is invalid,

signified especially by your interruptive assurance that

“I’m not trying to invalidate your problems or anything,” before

I have even said anything.

Because you have seen a country collapse,

you tell me the fact is that the collapse of my rib cage

is small – “I wish all the problems in the world were that small.”

Because you have been told you play viola well,

you reassure me that perhaps things will change in the future

and besides it doesn’t matter that the masterclass teachers don’t care

to hear me play, because I’ve stated that I don’t want to play, so

where is the conflict?

Because your family has seen starvation,

You teach me about starvation

and I know something about starvation

but I prudently

do not attempt to teach you about the collapse of my little isolationist

nation of one

and the physical starvation it incurred not because of

a grand-scale crisis but rather because everything

in that mind was extremely small

because I was privileged,

my problems were small and pink and rhinestoned,

but remember that the kitten that ripped a hole in a wrestler’s trachea

was also small, pink and rhinestoned

and stop accusing me of being small-minded

when your mind is the one that can’t seem to imagine

any nation, language, or sex drive other than your own

as if there were one continent on this planet

lonely and united.

Wherein all the “disrespectful” questions I refrained from asking burst out of my façade and graffiti themselves onto your edifice

Has it ever occurred to you that another person’s truth might be just as true as yours, or, put more bluntly, that your truth might be just as wrong as theirs?

If and when this occurred to you, did you turn up the dials on your ears to listen, or did you turn up the volume on the plastic heart on your sleeve to drown all other falsenesses out so only your artificial authenticity got heard?

And have you contemplated the possibility of a three-inch-high ice skater in a snow globe that is pushed from the bookshelf to the floor, how she might watch the microplastic flurry in stomach-turning sparkled whorls around her spinning four-by-four-inch cottage — and that it might be a giant thundersquall for her?

And have you imagined what happens when her plastic dome cracks on the edge of the nightstand, and the distilled water she breathes seeps away into the carpet, and her four-by-four-inch cottage breaks in half, and a piece of her forehead chips off — and that it is actually for her the end of the world?

And do you question the validity of her suffering because yours takes up so much more space (yours being, of course, the enormous suffering of the taxpaying master of the house who must unsheath the dustpan and broom and sweep away the remains and trek to the trash can to toss them who-knows-where [i.e. “away”] while daydreaming about all the people who don’t love you enough)?

And when you question the validity of the suffering of a porcelain figure in a snow globe, do you ever wonder if, from within her porcelain eyes, your own suffering appears inconsequential? And do you wonder if the big hands holding the snow globe around your own planet will ever slip and drop it into the throat-catch loss of perspective that is the black velvet universe?

And when you complain that the woman across the street does not fall in love with you — and when you turn around and say “I can’t finish my sentence, it’s too vulnerable” — do you ponder whether the guarding of your precious vulnerability might be related to her reluctance to find something worthy of tenderness in the trademarked silhouette of you that you allow her to see? And when you complain that you feel like a stranger among other city-walkers on this half of the coffee-crumpled continent, do you consider that all other city-walkers are strangers too?

Is it possible that one day you will unwind and retire the plastic heart on the trademarked sleeve, unbutton the edifice, and let the light juice out the real, meaty, gory, arterial-purple, gloop-encased, beautiful muscle behind your rib cage, and let the woman across the street and all the other city-walkers taste your everything-I-have-to-offer with their eyes and calculate whether they want to open their own rib cage to you? Can you jump first in the dark and trust that the other person will hold the line? Can you stop pretending to be infallible, so that the other person might have a chance of trusting you to hold the line as they rappel down into the dark, first? And will you follow? And if you cannot follow, today, because it is a bad mental-health day in your snow-globe… will you still like yourself? Or will you have to try on a new one tomorrow?

Without your permission

I will stay alive

I will spend money on myself

I will be priceless

I will love completely even if he doesn’t love back

I will floodshatter

& try again

I will drink the sun over a morning newspaper waiting to be written

And I will write some things in it that you will be not o.k. with

And I will open like a flower.

Fixing the truth

There are some things you can never say, no matter how true they are.

They will always be wrong.

Until society changes. But that might take longer than the average human lifespan.

So you won’t say them. You want society to like you.

But they are true. And they keep being, and you just can’t open your mouth, no matter how many tons of coal are shoveled onto your outstretched eyelids. And they are real and they hurt, but your hurt doesn’t matter, because you’re with the bad guys.

If you don’t say your hurt, you can be with the good guys.

I wanna be with the good guys.

It’s not true.

Crxss

As a product, you want to understand what you did wrong.

Were your capitals hegemonical? Was your masculinity a bit too intoxicating?

Or not intoxicating enough? Did the features you lacked reinforce

the social order? Can you speak about yourself in second person,

and is it stealing another person if you speak first?

The fastest way to win your own heart

was to change the context.

Now two years ago when you said you weren’t leaving

it is a lie.

Portrait of the Moss Animals as Poets

The firmament beneath us is a kelp-green flag,

weaving sunstrands out of oceanbreak.

 

None is whole without the other

incompletions,

a fading alabaster commune built of squares on squares in squares.

Some of us eat. Some copulate,

some twiddle their toes in the current, trying to catch

stars. Some of us do

catch stars. There is no glucose in stars,

so it is cheap to share them. So many twiddlings

flickering they braid almost a carpet of unhearing voices,

a sea of poems bursting forth from lips who have not known ears,

from minds who have not heard the words blaring from right next door,

from minds who may not even be aware that there is a next door,

for there are no doors between imploded temples of self-cycloned

indifference. I! I! I!

I throw need into the needling soup;

I draw back emptiness.

I construct my metaphors on blades; my justice has a stipe for a spine;

my reason writhes within the falseroots of my holdfast.

A flush enough storm will tear my clinging fingers from the rock

and toss me aside,

just like that, just like

love & sex & law,

just like the rest of my quadrilateral metropolis,

into the roarshrapnel hush

Image credits in order of appearance:

“Corambe pacific from Santa Cruz, California with egg spirals on bryozoan on giant kelp.” By Robin Agarwal [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

“Bryozoa colonies (Membranipora isabelleana) covering Macrocystis integrifolia pneumatocysts. The alga was floating near the center-northern Chilean coast.” By André-Philippe Drapeau Picard [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons