Friday, July 5, 2013

The Callow Power of Preservation









FEAR OF AN EMPTY LIFE

Jennifer Moxley

All the long imprint of a smooth utterance - a single adhesive
word slips away, snuggles beside the accusatory newborn
thought which, barking from lack of care, might trap in a moment
of serious sorrow me and my dirty heart, we twist the arm
of friendship 'til the ancient swing by the nonchalant body
is rewritten as a trembling, angry, grudge. Split along
the physique axis of wrested love and that human pulp
the wealthy mock, old need, a shuffle from the coffin lip
silences mind into fiddlehead body, bobbing in the fifty-fifty
sheets, weighty yet so pitiful it cannot coax solution - Darwin
was a fool, conductor of teeming masses, I see them now
in sedimentary patterns, crushed umber colors and a hint of green.

I am content when I do not think the disclosure of love is a
weakness, I imagine myself invincible like a bully who sees
in the fear he coerces from his weaker brother the only version of
truth he'll believe - satisfied sleep. I awake drenched, the sweat
between my breasts which are so small they cannot touch is slick
as mucous. The surface of beauty is awful and enormous to all of us
who are left behind and yet we seek our coordinates, willfully
follow them just the same as the moon might seem from certain
angles to willfully follow the earth. Choking pink ribbon of thought
fails the ferry crossing. Who cannot push life-sustaining rationalization
away without remembering, as though an error of judgment,
the callow power of preservation turned to resentment of the race.

It cannot, no matter, in verse, be real. Fucked up beauty
subtracts the awkward ugly plain ache of tripped-up memory stores
where I see you as a taut wing of fragile older skin whose pride
of effort flaps in an attempt to fly amidst its own disintegrating
structure, a sight so ridiculous that all but the buried are unable
to suppress their laughter and turn away. That's an image hovering
above me here where there is still in my imagination a cool carpet
underfoot, a flavor of drug's seductive distances, the expense of
early exits but no gun, never a gun. That weapon steals time for it
knows not what's in a minute. Tiny blindfold box of selfish stomach,
parasite life, the measure of a second is insufficient
to leave you behind, you and all your crippling indifference.



8 comments:

  1. Continued from yesterday, when I forgot to follow up because I was busy celebrating American exceptionalism by raping brown people, enslaving other inferiors, and picking my nose with rolled-up $1000 bills:

    Of course not. Aliens do you!

    Realistically: yes, I know you don't do aliens. It's metaphorical. It was even self-referentially ironic. Please to recognize pomo satire when it swats ineffectually at your ass.

    Also realistically: spiritually, you are always standing in the bass boat. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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  2. > What the?

    Given the proliferation of mersh spamblogs, probably a good thing you did it in time.

    Thanks for the big-up.

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  3. Thanks, Jeff. Most hated books? Some of them I hated (or would if I'd bother to read them -- all those Shades of Gray things; Eat, Pray, Love; etc.), but some I adored. The Great Gatsby?? People hate that?? WTF?

    Anyway, still wish I could read your blog, but white on black is still too headache-inducing. Sorry.

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    1. Yeah, I think it was noxzema bottle blue when you first told me that, dark green now. As you'll learn with your free blogging platform, blooger is maddening - it cut me off from making any changes in color or fonts or anything to the template about a year ago, so even if I wanted to change the color at this point (and I like the dark green) I couldn't.

      As for Great Gatsby, I neither loved or hated it, though I wonder what % of haters had to read it in high school and associate it with classes they hated and/or the people in those classes they hated and/or those years which they hated.

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    2. thinking of novels i read because they were required in class, silas marner shines in memory - a moving tale of redemption, and brought to the screen in a contemporary setting in the steve martin movie of a different title (specifically, "a simple twist of fate") - the girl in that movie is, according to wikipedia, now in medical school after success in an acting career

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