Poem for Those I Hate
There aren’t many of you, four or five,
boldly complexioned, consistently educated
in the tricks of self-regard, the cleansing of hands and hair.
One of you’s a pinworm spoiling a black velvet thong.
One of you hugs an armload of promotional brochures.
One reddens too much. One hit me with a belt.
You mustn’t assume my envy like your pageant sashes.
Hate is not single-celled. It multiplies, it divides.
I admit envy, but with envy comes pity.
With pity, a cosmology and an ethic.
When you all waved federally from the dais, I liked you.
My affection got pricked like the meat of a thumb, it oozed.
If I could agree with my hate,
I might comment cruelly on your spindly clavicle
or your social contortions, half-laugh half-sex,
or state without fear that God is a bastard.
But hate is a sin against ego
as a worker’s strike is a sin against usability.
The righteous shouting which energizes
can’t write a paycheck.
Picture my ego, my egg solidifying in hot grease,
slid out too soon, seeping all over the plate.
It’s hopeless, refrigeration can’t help.
Picture your egos, ice crystals
ruining a cream dessert.
Your sins? My inquiries can’t dissolve
your assorted meanings.
All of you, for example, vote impeccably.
I can only embrace my hate
if hate makes friends with life.
I don’t wish your deaths.
I wish you so much life you regret every bacterium you crush.
I wish you warmth in the aorta
and sight so keen your eyelids won’t shade against it.
I hear your coughs
and a gorge cuts itself between my eyebrows
like an ecstasy. Your sounds my opera.
Your motives my rebus I never solved,
my movie-twist I never saw coming.
Because you have grabbed more and better than I,
I don’t trust myself to write about you.
I trust myself to write about screens, a remove.
Like good citizens, you put your screens away for supper.
They complete each other.
On the iPad, a meetup of loved ones listening to Bach,
eating grapes during the quarantine.
On the iPhone, grape hyacinths stirring
in time with the sounds of common finches.
The synchronous images flare for you.
In your houses, I’m not as actual.
The hate I hold is common.
We know that story, you say.
We’re all vulnerable, one step from endangered.
Right? A common ground? You smile, quenched.
What if you threw it away, I ask.
The conviction, the accursed wholeness,
and oh jeez even the reward system.
But my voice comes out awkwardly kind.
That time and that time and that time, diminishment
dug into my forehead like a coronet.
You registered my unusability,
ready as prime muscle groomed at the gym.
Bad trellises on which I grow knobby.
Bad plastics that thrash in my sea while I make pretty things.
Puzzle Piece
She scrapes at first
against the edge
of her neighbor.
Her color is
tested. If right
she is swallowed
by her role in
the big picture,
a plebeian
necessity,
not applauded.
If wrong she is
flipped onto a
breath-held pile of
postponements, pitched
aside for her
outlandish shape.
If the last, she
endures the lot
of the fetish:
princess for a
centisecond,
then ignored once
completion is
had. Small wonder
that she sometimes
craftily finds
herself in a
different box,
sparing herself
the losing face
of fitting in.
Van Gogh, The Sower
Sometimes it comes to me like a punch in the face how deluded I’ve been my entire life.
The song lyrics, the movies. The three-act arcs.
I’m supposed to see the humble work ethic of the man sowing.
The setting sun makes a halo for him. What a contrast to his furtive stance, thief’s vestments.
The seeds clearly point to a brighter future.
Dear VVG,
A poem is what happens in the abyss between spectacle and experience
as you know.
I like the scythe-shaped things coming off the tree because I don’t know why the hell you put them there.
