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stork daddy
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Two agreeably unfinished people,
we met on the internet,
she the essential girl;
i left san Francisco
to keep becoming without me
and flew to rhode island,
where she lived.
We talked over coffee
the coffee was objective,
she was essential.
and the joke of the week
i stayed was “why rhode island?
I showed her my writing,
and she told me my writing was too full of metaphors.
but that’s ballooned speech;
everything is metaphor,
the question is, is the metaphor apt?
but it was true, the way her hand touched me then,
a softer criticism,
i really did cry unicorn shaped tears
and my unicorn shaped tears
cried unicorn shaped tears.
she made the country seem small and the world seem large
being on the east coast like that.
she told me of a past boy she thought now a snake
because he always bandied about the word idiot.
i don’t think snakes are deceitful either.
what is every hiss but a small idiot idiot idiot.
threatening but not deceitful.
A snake can hide, but it is there in its hiss
what it wants you to know.
no illusion of security
the nakedness of teeth sounding as they do in a hiss
a lot is implied sure, but -
perhaps a snake’s charm, a snake’s mercy
is that it expects you to understand and cares little
for whether you actually do.
We were at a bar later,
getting fucked up as an inalienable right.
we played five times straight
the ballad of ira hayes and harper valley pta
alternating.
she told me about a girl who she dated who once killed herself
“taking the long way home.”
i always liked in the old mythos
that a hero would die
and no longer look up to the constellations –
that they’d become one.
they’d become the well chosen word
in some song.
I think it made me sad. don’t be butthurt about it, she said.
butthurt - that’s a lovely phrase.
a testament to her attraction that even a phrase laced with the anal
made me think of kissing her lips.
she saw I was too contemplative and for some reason just
said: “We all want a god all powerful, but also in line exactly with our desires.
rich to the rest of the world, indebted infinitely to us.”
I like to think there are different types of heroes.
suicides become constellations too.
a constellation in their own night, as they say.
i felt the need to add as they say to everything spoken by me that night.
on the walk back from the bar to her college town housing
we talked about whether ascribing to trannsexuals
discrete characteristics as is necessary in liberal politics
undermined the revolutionary fluidity of the trans.
I just didn’t know anymore.
i wanted to speak on it but I felt I was doing such violence
no, nevermind, I have nothing to say.
We sat on her/your sofa listening to notorious b.i.g.
you explained it to me. I never did read word up magazine,
but I did read magazines.
And what was I trying for,
a more sophisticated hiss, I suppose
the feeling that I’m not yet a constellation
i cannot become one.
you must also understand this if you are not to become one.
if you adorned in whiteness will tell me about juicy
about the east coast and the west coast,
making the country seem small, the world large, as they say.
I thought for a while and inverted the title of a book on your shelf:
Matters that body, I said.
And then thought -
Fluidity. Idiot.
I called you weeks later, and told you I was thinking about you
You giggled sullenly saying liar, liar, liar.
Double consciousness perhaps.
Talking to you on the phone,
Motorcycleers passed me doing wheelies
Becoming a part of you that you never knew about.
Whatever, don’t worry about it you/her said
It became, we beheld it.
No big deal.
“Yes, but it’s just that,” and the wheelies were almost
spoken, “no, nevermind, I have nothing to say.”
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