“You always made the best tea”, I confess.
Something in the method: fanning the bag
In the cathartic lung space ‘tween spoon and china.
“you’re too new” she mocks, “too shiny”,
Indisposed in her sketchbook, tracing the tentacled yew tree
Down to its most primitive honesty: its brutal
Old-man nakedness
and child-bearing insect chambers
Then down further still to where its bony roots gift hair to
The all-seeing Undermoon-
“What of the Undermoon?” I start,
“Off topic”
“and the yew tree?”
“salvation”
“and red?”
“humanity.”
“Then what of sentience? Of masturbation?
Of the lions we left to nurse the newborns?”
“How round their heads would look in crowning jaw”.
We bake, as usual,
Outwards -> in like Grandma did,
though our cookies are never so sweet.
“I don’t like eyes”, she offers after a pause.
“I have too many windows you see,
Too many stalls. Peepholes.
Too many cracks and crevices they can crawl into
Like after-9 anti-gentlemen
Hunting the Blood Egg.
O eyes, eyes, eyes,
Hooking to me like pollen to the pelt of the fattest,
Most barren honeybee.”
“But what of the faces? The sockets they alight?”
“They would have me a table-top tragedian!
A pocket-sized Rasputin wound up to dance my
Ends again and again, a quavering filament
afire
afire
afire.
O would you not just unplug it all?
Break from that wheezing old Undermoon?
What has it offered you anyways?
For I have known the pain of sunrise,
How it soars like a fist -
A swift influenza
Blistering the grassy worms that wriggle like
Fingers on my summertide lawn.
O tell me, would you not just unplug it all?
Detach from the great milky umbilical
That holds us all distinct?
They do not see, they just do not
See!
Poetry is no gift to beauty,
It is an amputation.
It is a funeral.
A grey hair. A gold tooth. A black leaf. A freckle.
It is a death
of part."
“You do not see”, she smiles.
“you just do not see.
You’re too new.
Still just
Too
shiny”.
