Friday Poem
Wherein I share a poem every other Friday. Starting with a newish one of mine.
bring the whole animal close to your ear*
I am unfree in so many ways it makes my chest seize up.
I am free in so many ways it scares me.
I am freer than most people I love, or have loved,
or even those I am wilfully in the process of trying not to love.
Ask me how that’s going. Ask me something else.
We can choose a smatter of small talk
that’s worthy of our cavernously total boredom.
My sinuses are as clear as day.
My day is as clear as glass.
My vision for my life can fit on the head of a thimble.
I am proud of making myself so small.
A tried-and-tested survival mechanism
which allows me to fold up and fit anywhere.
I am a bundle of survival mechanisms.
On the train, I can feel my heart froth up.
My diamond-cut aspirations brim over,
drenching the twin tongues of my low tops.
My shoes belong to the same material realm
which denies my diamond-cut aspirations.
My shoes are this poem’s symbolic scaffolding
for the immobility I feel, even when I am hurtling
in a metal tube towards my destination,
towards whatever destination
the day’s anesthetizing routines of work
and workplace niceties demands of me.
I am a ruffle of minor miseries.
I love sitting at the back.
Being unacknowledged is a luxury many can’t afford.
I don’t take it lightly when I enjoy it.
As a child, I was specific with my discontent.
I went willingly.
The back of the bus.
That altar where you could blast UK funky
from your battered marmalade & white Sony Ericsson
while besuited commuters threw daggers with their eyes.
Back of the class. Back of the playground.
Back of the family photo. Leering from the margins.
Risus sardonicus. I wrapped my quiet sadness
around the frame and passed it down.
You can get quite good at that trick.
You just have to keep practicing.
There will be an abundance of terror and a terror of abundunce.
Obviously, we didn’t know that then.
Let’s pretend we did.
Let’s be sublimely imprecise with our obsessions.
Like the kind of sunsets which make it impossible
to distinguish which thread of light best resembles
the evidence of weeping on fresh bed sheets.
Let’s remember how the swordfish was grilled to perfection.
How we flake just as easily.
The practiced sentimentality of the waiter’s gestures.
How a flourish of hands can save you.
On some days.
Joan of Arc is the patron saint of both soldiers and rape victims.
A paradox is the smell of singed flesh.
It’s the most annoying person in the crowded room
screaming FIRE!!!
If you’re breathing, you’re probably a hypocrite.
We get it. What else you got?
Ignoring the itch won’t make it go away.
Neither will diagnosing it in someone else.
As if there isn’t enough punishment in the world,
writers delight in punishing themselves.
Though contortionists make better money.
Everyone is so serious all the time
about the most unserious things.
This is a tragedy of intimate proportions.
If you can’t take a joke or a punch,
what can you take?
I, too, used to be beautifully curated.
There are too many truths to bear
and too little rewards for the bearing.
Good taste doesn’t pay the bills.
Congratulations.
You have industriously cultivated
an ethical sense of humour.
The joke’s still on you.
There is enough anguish to go round.
You don’t have to hoard it all for yourself.
Your dreams are just as footless as mine.
We’re all soaked anyhow.
Holding onto the same rags.
*title borrows from a line in Robert Kelly’s poem “The Embassy”.
yeah idk, many days will go by with poems doing nothing for me, and then one day, one small moment, lines will lift off and stab my chest like answered prayers. i've been thinking a lot about this poem since i read it. there's a lot i'd like to say, but just thanksss thanksss.