dearheart of mine (you know it's so) here (under-the-covers- land) so shiver now quivering childlike blink and breathe with no one to be save you & me the wiser of (no telling) what touch we (thin touch quiet touch) touch or feel we each skin sweet feel and flower
Standing at the trough where we pee, the men make it look like they know what they're doing. A quarter of the women are bleeding. There are large buildings in the background clustered together like those found in many famous images. In the foreground sits a childhood friend professing how you were right all along. A host of wild animals parade though. You walk away from the scene and nobody can tell if it's out of disgust or confusion, which is just what you wanted...
If she were to open her eyes, she wouldn't believe her senses. A battalion of daffodils crawling slowly and surely up her back and planting themselves on her slumped shoulders is taking precautionary measures. When it rains she'll have to wake up and go inside a house and maybe lay down. When it rains, they're the first to know. She's dreaming of eating a peach and masticates in her sleep, making the noises one would while eating a peach if there was none and with a dry mouth. There is a great big scary monster waiting behind the peach to pick all the daffodils off her shoulders, but I'd rather not say anything...
Down by the dirtied docks the seagulls are struggling against the wind; not the winds of chance or the wind that cries a lover's name, just the wind. This is a secular poem.
It's written on the wall: No Fishing. The fishermen's wall is deserted; the wind has blown all the fishermen away, nothing but shallows in the shallows.
What's more than this is that this western wind shambles dead skin and waste about the barren streets, innocent of us.
I like a pretty stranger sometimes better than my own friends and family, because of all what I shouldn't say, and how it doesn't matter, and probably never will.
I finished a poem just last night, having written the first draft while listening to "Naive Melody", by the Talking Heads, on repeat, a song to which JR brought my attention as "the song of his and Adrienne's relationship"--it is now the first song on my Sadness Type B mix, Home Sadness. Not to say I was particularly homesick when listening to it the other night, but looking for an energy which I was able to receive from the music. After finishing this initial draft, I immediately began revising, and soon found that this was actually the third generation of a poem I had written three or four years prior in the Reed library which at least slightly cracked-out. Here's the original poem:
[Spiders maneuver solely because they can.]
Spiders maneuver solely because they can. Each time I ask to see my fingerprints on your skin you turn away. They look dulled you say, but maybe you're rubbing them off and you don't know you're rubbing them off, maybe you don’t know how Your name is too much for me. Some words are heavy to lift, your name is heavy to look at. I am heavy to look at it, to say it, to say it means because I say it.
A year or two later, I cleaned it up, me being on the minimalist swing of the stylistic pendulum: With You some words are heavy to lift, your name is heavy to look at, I am heavy to look at it, to say it, to say it means because I say it.
And now, unknowingly, I've taken this thread with me:
The place you once lived
The foundation is poured cement, then the bricks or wood and later, glass-- something rises where it wasn't before.
People walk in and out, carrying beds and food and gifts and pictures; and the garbage goes in the garbage can.
The young grow old and the old grow old. The house grows soft with their habits and memories, which only ever grow heavier.
And the people make the house so heavy, hanging their memories on every doorknob, throwing their space into every space; the house is so heavy they call it home, and so soft they live inside of it until they leave it, still heavy and soft.
A home is a lover, pregnant in knots of wood, autumn light, in arrangements of furniture and bedtime stories-- pregnant in whatever it rests. When you leave it, as you have and as you will, having tried to make it brittle, the feeling will still be that of tearing flesh from flesh.
A part of you will wish your love hadn't been so heavy, it will want the strength to brush aside the weight of you; it will be the place you once lived.
...Unfortunately, the blog won't show indentations, so that much is lost here. I'd suggest also reading the poem going line 1, 2-1, 3-2-1, and like this for each verse paragraph--with some imaginative interpretation of punctuation, it can shed new light on the poem, be rhetorically more forceful, or just plain fun to read in a different way.
