random poem: friday, 4.5.19, 4 am
After my curves developed,
my first boyfriend called me “Bitch”;
he was my “boyfriend” only
when he wasn’t driving his fireball-spitting mustang
to his other girlfriend’s down the street.
(Evidently, I did “ethical non-monogamy” before it was all the rage,
then it was called being treated like a whore).
After I discovered my spiritual self,
my next beloved called me “Goddess”
His sweat smelled a
combination of metal, rain, grow operations.
He called me goddess like
I was factory made,
a single, molded object in a line of the same.
The next man: I went through the motions,
so did he.
Together, we were both 1/2 way in— all the way.
“Hi baby”, he’d say in the morning (we adulted so significantly that I’d pull the sleep from
his eyes)
“Hi baby” he’d say in the morning, day and night– somehow
he fell asleep on the word. It was like a remote-control/miller-light/sunday game/popcorn bowl
filler word.
It came free with the box & owner manual.
When the iron fell onto my heart: when he dropped his rite of passage
on my clay feet
I went into
a glacial biome,
no man would call me anything there.
Covered myself
in a fortress
of
uninterpretable,
unnamable
shrouds.
Invisibility.
Occasionally, one man or another
Would find me with his define-o-meter
and brush-up his sizing-up
on me.
“You seem like a… uh… uh…
Angel. Devil. Jew. French woman. Artsy. High-strung.
Intense. Innnnteresting.”
No matter the feedback, just
being seen
through his eyes
altered the
wild edge of my curiosity.
I fought to keep that edge, I whittled it against god, against a god
that was not a man, was not even science, but was the god of survival;
surviving what would have once seemed impossible.
There, unaltered, at the edge of my curiosity I was led
into a middle-wood, where the oldest
woman on the earth lived.
She had been defined so many times:
even mythology had pinned her down,
“witchy, belligerent, contentious, contemptuous, conspicuous,
manipulative, daunting, pointed, snarly.”
I met her on a river; on a new moon;
my body shedding the way only a woman’s can do.
Escaped from the city, the forever canvas
upon which I am paint splashed, at highest hopes a Jackson Pollack.
The oldest woman wiped a stuck strand of sun-struck hair from my damp cheek,
somehow I was not guarded. Of course, I suffered my own define-o-meter:
I heard myself sizing her up, as we women did the same to each-other as what had been
done to us.
(“Is she belligerent? Is she snarly, daunting, sane?”)
Fortune smiled on me that she spoke despite my sharp reservedness.
“They will call you everything if you effuse,
if you ring out, if you sing.
And you will be that loose cannon, that shrill nerve
that electric throbbing strobe, the cheshire cat and red intensity
until you love yourself beyond their terms.
They will observe you, they will see parts of themselves they haven’t explored
nor embraced. If you can see through them,
they will call you names.
They will call you names false, outworn, inferior, pejorative
until you know your name.
Until you love your name in all of its most silent ineffable vowels
And delectable consonants.
Good luck, she said— the oldest woman,
And she turned around,
blending into the crackled tree bark and dry summer soil,
by her self,
to disappear into a retired mineshaft,
pouring her inspiration into the
welcoming, thirsty
Mineral-hungry earth.
my first boyfriend called me “Bitch”;
he was my “boyfriend” only
when he wasn’t driving his fireball-spitting mustang
to his other girlfriend’s down the street.
(Evidently, I did “ethical non-monogamy” before it was all the rage,
then it was called being treated like a whore).
After I discovered my spiritual self,
my next beloved called me “Goddess”
His sweat smelled a
combination of metal, rain, grow operations.
He called me goddess like
I was factory made,
a single, molded object in a line of the same.
The next man: I went through the motions,
so did he.
Together, we were both 1/2 way in— all the way.
“Hi baby”, he’d say in the morning (we adulted so significantly that I’d pull the sleep from
his eyes)
“Hi baby” he’d say in the morning, day and night– somehow
he fell asleep on the word. It was like a remote-control/miller-light/sunday game/popcorn bowl
filler word.
It came free with the box & owner manual.
When the iron fell onto my heart: when he dropped his rite of passage
on my clay feet
I went into
a glacial biome,
no man would call me anything there.
Covered myself
in a fortress
of
uninterpretable,
unnamable
shrouds.
Invisibility.
Occasionally, one man or another
Would find me with his define-o-meter
and brush-up his sizing-up
on me.
“You seem like a… uh… uh…
Angel. Devil. Jew. French woman. Artsy. High-strung.
Intense. Innnnteresting.”
No matter the feedback, just
being seen
through his eyes
altered the
wild edge of my curiosity.
I fought to keep that edge, I whittled it against god, against a god
that was not a man, was not even science, but was the god of survival;
surviving what would have once seemed impossible.
There, unaltered, at the edge of my curiosity I was led
into a middle-wood, where the oldest
woman on the earth lived.
She had been defined so many times:
even mythology had pinned her down,
“witchy, belligerent, contentious, contemptuous, conspicuous,
manipulative, daunting, pointed, snarly.”
I met her on a river; on a new moon;
my body shedding the way only a woman’s can do.
Escaped from the city, the forever canvas
upon which I am paint splashed, at highest hopes a Jackson Pollack.
The oldest woman wiped a stuck strand of sun-struck hair from my damp cheek,
somehow I was not guarded. Of course, I suffered my own define-o-meter:
I heard myself sizing her up, as we women did the same to each-other as what had been
done to us.
(“Is she belligerent? Is she snarly, daunting, sane?”)
Fortune smiled on me that she spoke despite my sharp reservedness.
“They will call you everything if you effuse,
if you ring out, if you sing.
And you will be that loose cannon, that shrill nerve
that electric throbbing strobe, the cheshire cat and red intensity
until you love yourself beyond their terms.
They will observe you, they will see parts of themselves they haven’t explored
nor embraced. If you can see through them,
they will call you names.
They will call you names false, outworn, inferior, pejorative
until you know your name.
Until you love your name in all of its most silent ineffable vowels
And delectable consonants.
Good luck, she said— the oldest woman,
And she turned around,
blending into the crackled tree bark and dry summer soil,
by her self,
to disappear into a retired mineshaft,
pouring her inspiration into the
welcoming, thirsty
Mineral-hungry earth.