An Exquisite Corpse 30 Days in the Hole
I
She rouses from a road bump,
spots me reading a book of poems,
and assumes me to be educated.
Her sweatshirt is rolled up like a bikini top,
unveiling her large stomach
with the pomp of a premiering vaudeville show.
She’s been unselfish since birth,
salt of the earth worth her weight in gold.
Sold down the river at her own demand,
she walked straight into our house of mourning,
wrapped her wise arms around my 11-year old frame,
and kissed my tortured mind.
She reminds me that spring is coming back for us;
we just have to spin the world a little more first.
But she’s been forgotten and forlorn,
become a run-down ghost town
whose people left her long ago in heart
before she lost them to industry.
And I write to her, to you because I loved, love, will love you
and I want to understand who you are,
who you were, and who you’re still yet to become.
Watch now how slowly a tear can form,
and then fall, when you’re crying
and think you have nothing
worth being sad about.
II
The sexiest thing you’ve ever said to me was
I want you inside me
and all my blood rushed center and down.
But you were supposed to be my sandbox, not my stone tablet;
there to make me realize how quickly I would die.
Our void grows contemptuous,
widens with each jealousy,
sprouts a new offshoot so green,
so doomed to be forgotten.
I hope your children grow up to be poets
so you’re never able to understand them.
I reread the printed letters from my lawyer,
make constellations of his patterned excuses.
I catch every person’s phone conversation
and reply to both ends, snatch their vested secrets,
could expose the truths of their youths.
But you haven’t read about me in your guidebooks,
and you’re not sure who to believe anymore.
III
Born of the same soured soil and tainted rain,
we did the only thing we knew how,
grew inward – tighter and tighter into each other,
hoping that our togetherness could save us
from the harshness of our surroundings.
But the darknesses we hold inside us –
deep and consuming enough to digest galaxies –
have somehow found homes in our foreign bodies.
We are eroding within, like our lost coast,
ever crumbling into the insatiable gulf
as grown men seek a fantastical world
where their monsters obey them
and not the other way around.
She had to have heard the morning moanings
of VHS vixens through thin walls.
Shut up, shut up, sit down, and get lost
in this sitcom rerun with him for the third time today.
His self-slapped golden handcuffs keep him
tight where his boss wants him,
marionetting stability and rigidity
as our former selves fight inside to stay alive,
waiting for the worst moments
to resurrect themselves in their familiar haunts.
He couldn’t domesticate the beast with obedience;
his training just taught him to gnaw the wrong things.
We want to be brackish,
but fear what we may kill in the process –
some just can’t comprehend the water’s ways:
filled only with soft breathing and flushed skin –
the work of an inexperienced child
who’d only before fucked women
to submission in his mind.
And your elegance and innocence couldn’t save you,
not this time.
One day, they’ll understand
the power of a peaceful moment,
the courage of calming the raging storms of their souls,
the wisdom of harnessing their ferocity for greater ends.