The Guardian
All of a sudden the gravity in the room changed.
Some woman was controlling some device.
A purple parachute came down
and we stopped drawing breath.
We smiled. We couldn’t stop smiling
past one another
as we floated down and up
with the pitched fabric
to ride the room and all
my displaced relationships:
my husband, my new son,
even my own loosened body.
The lights were starting to blink
warning either that she was about to start
loving us or we were about to blow out.
Everyone I had lost
was becoming too young
to offer me wisdom;
she bowed over the device
and I flew easily, winded.
Then my son said he would go with her
and pointed until his finger
floated away,
his face still roving without his intentions
while I stood there
grinning and hopeless about his first sentence.
Soon his limbs grayed as his face reddened.
Then his face grayed as his laughter
bleached the room, his eyes
trembled in their sockets
and lost purpose.
The woman at the motherboard
with all the silver switches
was kneeling now in a flowery dress
and beckoning him
to take his first steps which he did
while we watched from above,
outraged but kind enough
as if his body responding
to the woman’s voice
was an acceptance of our mortality.
Instead of falling or getting hurt ever again
he dislodged from the back of her knee
some sharp blue-black arrow
I used to take as free will,
before I knew it was hazardous
and a lie, and as I had no breath
to hold nor weight to reach down to remove it
he grated the arrow against the device
called family.
* * * * * *
In a Minute
I will leave this room
at 6am in gold and
if I am still wearing sequins
for a party continuously
postponed
they will fly off
and become the ugliest
fish.
I will leave my keys.
I will remember at the last
second my body
but the life will have locked
behind me.
Likewise someone I loved
will have turned out
on the threshold
to be a fiction.
A beetle will be bold
and tell my foot
it is rotting before
the arch ever falls.
It will be okay though,
my flesh,
my children real
and imagined
child that is almost me.
The cramp I invented
in my invisible side
since I was
dimensional & self-
conscious comes back
and I can say
painlessness is bullshit
now that I’m gone
and beauty is still
the great aim
but the measure of it
is a starched martial arts
uniform. The awe
we know of gods
comes expected and without
object. Like water boiling
on a flame, it
stays forever whether or not
you believe.
The soul system is more
like a necklace
someone you admired
shed outside their own funeral
and you found it,
beauteous loser.
The competition here
is a counterpoint:
who gets to keep their days?
The party is thrown for me
by me.
Backlit.
Bachelorette.
It involves mosquitoes
performing butler duties
and a cold cold death wish
like ceviche
in a martini glass
I keep passing
around myself: hors d’oeuvres
for the new decade.
I am the tower-for-now,
the done doorbell,
the temperamental blue
animal
shut in the guest room
of my first family,
hearing humans
I made and will make,
getting domestic.