Thing
for Sara Renee Marshall, 4/14/2013
Sometimes I sit at my computer, intending to write a sincere thing about how I love another human & how every moment I’ve spent with this other human has made my life better but what surfaces is I am Petra-bound, a circular scratch in the compact disc, your idle-roll unrolled, or, About snuggling the old masters are never wrong, or, merely, polio nut flood.
There is a thing inside me, I once thought it a failure & then, briefly, a talent, but it’s just a thing, similar to what caused Haji, intending to yell out Housekeeping, to yell out Housekleeping, similar to what makes those 90s R&B hits still so reliable an opportunity, except that the thing is all of me.
Your thing is a different thing.
The thing in me makes me write about hoeing fields of cod, challenger-crash flavored sour patch children stuck in my molars.
Your thing makes you look at the world for so long & so exactly that the world gets anxious & undoes its belt, looking back at you as if to say Is this want you want? & you look back at the world, right in the skin-space between its big eyes, as if to say No.
When I’m writing I’m not speaking—it’s like a glass of lemonade-flavored Crystal Lite.
When you’re writing it’s speaking.
And that has made all the blifference.
Lets go down to Barnes & Noble & steal all the books about the Doors, Jim Morrison, angels, etc; let’s find a real live mountain & name it something pertinent.
I love you & every moment I’ve spent with you has made my life better.
So let’s go now & eat something sensible.
It is a horrible world that we need to be.
It is a horrible, phantasmal world that we need to make more horrible through beauty.
We need to keep ourselves fueled & primed, wary & reveling, building calluses everywhere there’s still skin & licking the spilled flavor crystals off the backs of our hands, prepared & always-preparing for the laborious weeks of clean-up that will follow the inevitable & fantastic horrors of the polio nut flood.
Posted 04/14/13
This is a poem for Sara Renee Marshall