#14

To the Lifers, To Make Much of Life

On that poorly lit stage with a microphone, wildly
crackling, in your hand as a crowbar, you pull
the bronzed listeners in slowly and painfully. Numbers
about death and money. Everything that gets anyone
mad, red faced, like you when a line slips. Though,
those watching are just as well rehearsed, surreptitiously trained
how to graciously absorb your flaws. You root around in an invisible
dumpster, holding aloft and tossing a javelin into the lawn. No
one is home. Though you run to shake the doorframe, mangle
the doorbell, peel back the hinges like an orange.

You are an abortionst. You slowly kill pre-formed logic
until it begs under the blade's heavy weight. It whines
and shrieks until a transformation occurs. There is no
fallacy, no illogicality, no falsehood. You've leveled the playing
field with your simple words. You are writing a stumbling,
rehearsed poetry in the stale, community air. The blade
presses deeper. It may be alive. Anonymous half-living guts.
Your hair frizzed out to nowhere, you find a blue way to shine, sad beyond
measure and reason. There is nothing around that peeks in.
No challenges to sweep you off your feet. Prince Charming,
teaching free night classes, never comes around. You build a blood
palace of imagery to keep him out of everything.

What is anything named that you've built around you?
Anyone outside is too sad to peel enough layers and start cataloguing,
lest they fall in and feel a new fury, naming everything all at once
in a new bestseller, devoured whole, flames stoked higher again. When I think
of every little touch you've made, the man who made the video
you're showing, every touch he made, to bring all of this reactionary
hate together, I go dizzy. To comprehend spending so long scratching
in dust to blow over another person's designs. It's out of reach. Every racist
city block you claim is claimed by the same kinds of people with different
brands of chalk and spit. Mark and salivate, move on, leave a colored wall,
wet with shine, that makes no sense. The beauty in it, though, is keeping the lights
on. There is a heart in you, like in the heart of any beast, and it is beautiful.
I have no doubt that you are human. I want to reduce you though. I grind energy
and hold it back, filmy scenes where I cast you into some contemporary hell.
The want isn't in strong enough portions. I let it drop. I try to walk away, to think
of a better question next time. There is a question, my mind teaches, that brings
peace to this place…

No one lives between walls. And where anyone is beautiful there are blotches.