Dream # Brook
For Derek
I.
Broken I, chasing brook downstream, its little rocks reborn in colour. Makeover, the gift of water. Pheasants at a distance. Nest, overturned. The sheep ambling off in a crowd whenever broken I, close enough to wool-grab. Five fingers, with which to hold, but there are no foxes, and their absence stings. Were a tod’s red tail to manifest, the sambal of earth by my feet wouldn’t confuse me; there’d be a logic to my pursuit, the ephemerality of stone with vibrant wet, and the missing eggs would make sense. I’d give the brook’s babble a tongue. I’d give it something to say.
II.
Brook speaks in own way. My feet sink to its teeth when I try to hop across. Moss is squishing gums. To press my fingers beneath the baby waterfalls on each jagged incisor is to create divots in speech. Cannot complete. Cannot compete. My thumbs fuse to stone, an ancient pillar of new talk. Petrification is the fastest means of becoming medusa or canon. The brook is asking me for a root canal, but the nearest tree is several metres away and I doubt I could rob it of ground without making my callused souls bleed. So many questions are the waters rising. I can’t move until I answer.
III.
Three cycles deep. The blue house with the backyard where I once gobbed a snail, dirt-encrusted foot and all. There’s a magnolia tree; my mother planted one just like it in a later garden for Julie. Scale infested her bark. This one is strong. Not stronger; sad, the difference, I note, reflective enough to note this moment of lucidity. I pee behind it when I am too lazy to go indoors. The brook within pours out in shame then vanishes. I sit at my plastic kid table and squirt glitter onto pebbles. Plastic tubes in pudgy digits. Their glimmer pigment: gold, princess, mermaid scale. The fox sees me. I’m not much bigger than him. I wrench a spit of meat from the barbeque, burn my hands, squat, lay the ashen kabob on the ground and step back. Who knows if I am five.
IV.
Who knows if I am five or more—an entourage of elements composing the strand: fox gifted rotisserie chicken in Dungeness, not crab. Magnolia trees. Sheep are too hot in fleece; nightmare-hot. Shy of blankets I throw off as brook begins to howl. Teeth out of mouths spill to gorgon. Rattling gargle of phone on vibrate. The stones dusty when dry, my parched throat. I’m fracturing into vocables—all shape, no meaning. Go. Prints. Maid. Ply my glut her twos owns. Wrongness. Loop pedal dawn. Confiture of discomfit sinks. Eggs crack.
V.
What emerges? A silent music, an Enya of hills. Limbo before the wake, the drifting blight, the crack and camping in fields where Julie built the bomb shelter. No wonder kept sheep at bay. Bats in the old building. Bottles from a pagan road underfoot. Apples and figs sweeten on branch, wasps exiting galls, their hero’s journey spent. The brook goes gentle into what’s no longer night. The hill lax against my mattress. Julie is telling us about the apocalypse. Pressure on balsamic like a bladder, bright lighter. Broken I returning to day.
GROUPON SEX
Carpool to the cesspit altogether now.
Across the glass tabletop or online ether
drowsy lips ask how I feel about being
a third. Third wheel in the threesome?
That, I know. Don’t drive, have yet
to attain my license so please don’t suggest
I take us all to Costco. Discount at the disco,
light-headed cities living rent-free
in the head given so well.
The company partners with providers of goods
and services by hosting a discount deal and keeping
a percentage of the profit as a marketing fee.
Sex and the settee we’ll all carry home.
Club card for access to assets. Everyone
carries their weight. I’ll pay for the gas.
DEAD RABBIT
She don’t cum here no more
To & From
For Mariana
Met a man studies freedom. Talks a lot, of shoulds and ought-tos.
Lower hemline, hem-haw in polite company, ease with echinacea the flu.
Pass me the mic. Ponder PhDs but truth is, I’d rather listen to Bush—
Kate, never George. Patient-less doctor in the palliative ward,
and impatient too, I tend what I can control. A gorgeous fill in misty light;
garden rosy and full, security of clusters debuting the season on lilac bough.
Remember, budded flower, circles are for fairies and toadstools,
not occupation. Wilt—bridge mystic and modern. I wear this cross
when I need strength and when I don’t, ’cause talismans are rechargeable batteries.
Call me green, vulgar—call me the olive in your martini.
Technocrats For Mixology; James Bond, all hot glue. The truth will set you.
God is a panel of experts and he all think different. Sweaty clasp
matts the ticket, blossoms wind up my legs like treble clefs before gasping,
I chance to voice my question. Last week, a friend claimed jazz
passive aggressive. Rock, a fistfight. Bluegrass, clear rule for the unready.
Which system is the going berserk inside, during intermission?
We improvise a dance, sweet and heady like. Only after, through fate’s lens,
does it become choreography. I’m coming, as much as I’m going. We are all overdue.
On Millennials
Coltish and jean-clad
the walking jawline
acutely angled keeps
chin tucked to chest in
the way a growth
spurt distorts a child’s
sense of what they will
become.
A stele on the street
he ambles stonily along
in time to lost anthems,
tucks his skin
into acne-scarred
shirt, smile cha-cha-ing
across bared teeth.
He is the marching
creed that reminds in high-stomp
of our boundaries inviolable
as the cement we walk.
But wonder
what happens to hunchbacks
whose comedonal chins
tip up thinking
to straighten spines.
The Midas Touch: Gold Leaf & Butt Stuff
The poet Erin Robinsong has a line in one of her pieces that goes, “I don’t bleach my asshole. I goldleaf it.”
I don’t think anything’s ever struck me quite the way this line has. I only excel at sangfroid when I don’t really care about someone, and as a general rule I find it very hard not to care about people. And by that definition, I suppose it isn’t even true sangfroid because there’s no emotional strain—no duress, because I either care and can’t grit my teeth or don’t care and therefore, don’t need to. What can I say? I’m no James Bond.
Robinsong might be. Her line has a degree of refreshing blatancy to it. The prospect of goldleafing one’s asshole—besides its obvious impracticality—is delightful because it both empowers through an implied augmentation of status and makes a parody of that most private and taboo of body parts. Why vajazzle your vajayjay when you can line your anus with hammered gold? It’s cold, and it’s clever, like Shirley Bassey’s lustrous voice when she sings “It’s the kiss of death from Mr. Goldfinger.”
I love the turn of that second line: the sense of one-upmanship. Of retort. Now, I have absolutely nothing against bleaching. People may bleach their assholes for many a reason, but a common one is the cosmetic appeal. The wish to glamour a part of the body that leads into your insides in such an abrasive manner can speak at once to our love for others and ourselves (I mean, that’s DEEP care, right?), and our anxieties. Bleaching does have this association with a sense of insecurity in pop culture, and Robinsong’s couplet challenges that: taking possession of the body and flaunting the act. We use goldleaf to gild feats of architecture and raise our culinary exploits to the next level. Arguably, goldleafing your asshole does both these things.
And what of the hole itself? In The Denial of Death Ernest Becker features the delightful line “we are gods with anuses.” The anus, he says, is the primary piece of evidence for our mortality and thus a source of shame. I have several bones to pick with Becker, but I do love this line too. If we are gods with anuses, what better reason to adorn ourselves in gold?
But maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. I get the appeal of butt stuff in the bedroom, but I’m not sure I’d love an auriferous cavity anywhere other than in poetry. That being said, goldleaf is pretty flimsy. Perhaps it feels decadent to decorate your lover then eat it off them. In this case, all that glitters really is.
N.b.: This spirited line is from a poem in Rag Cosmology by Erin Robinsong. Contextualized by the work, it encourages a cosmic and ecological reading. However, here my focus is exploring the line by itself.
Ever, After
You marry the prince before
you know how to bleed.
His vocabulary doesn’t extend beyond “the end.”
Brow furrows as a crimson rose blossoms
in your gusset on the wedding night,
His innocence tenfold worse
for one who slays dragons. Reassure him
no thorns protrude from your thighs.
You, the moon beside his sleeping form,
a boon that makes the best of it,
think, It’s not hist fault.
At least he isn’t a somnophiliac.
Never left those fetters in a faraway land.
Once-upon-a-time kicks like a road-weary horse
at the smell of the saddle.
Your homespun damsel verges on adolescent,
slender as a twig—
she plays with her golden ball
in a garden
where cement-sealed wells
are a spindle-free zone.
You rub your aching wrists.
One keen thorn on the stem has gone
unnoticed during the safety inspection.