Poems, thoughts, and stories.
I once fell in love. I once found a prince. He stood on a beach dark against the rolling surf, full with the universe. I once flew into daring rough hands, mute, lucky, held — an odd fish silent and ready, silent as hope. “Why couldn’t you be a woman?” In rowdy hands I wiggled the signs, did my best to become sexy, curvaceous, something — but slipped lonely-homeward back to the sea that rushed for me.
*
“For gold is tried in fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.”
We are not equal, not in this land. Your love is not my love. I don’t care what stickers say. You and I are not equal in this land. When mine sleeps, when his scourged spirit lays down legal sin, lets slip Christian hate: when I worship what you can’t see, witness his dreaming mouth curl in playful expertise, hands stroke invisible joy — he’s cooking something, I can tell — Original Fire! Then I assay you, set ablaze your soul, wonder why ; find on your foul stone the smoky remnants of an absent father-god — babbled orphan-speak raving of war, always war mad-driven to despise all bounty execrate all bonds sacrifice hope to a doll — No. You and I are not equal in this land. Your love is not my love. Mine is fire and yours is ash. You and I are not equal in this land.
*
(“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” — Justice Clarence Thomas, proving his worth.)
“You came out talking.”
I hold my breath against this metal world, this chewy phlegm and snot-dripping contraption, close tight my eyes against the green-gowned monster and think: “What the fuck! Deceiving womb!” Sweat and salty tears now on my cheeks — why is she crying? Narcissist. I was the one ripped into a rotting cell that tasted of — is that excrement? — birthed into man’s horrendous hall, his macabre theater of death and religion. And she’s crying? I scream. (Was that the “talking” you heard?)
*
Note:
Coming home from college for the first time, I told my mother what I’d learned in my philosophy class: “Your fifteen minutes of passion condemned me to death.”
Her response: “Sounds like your philosophy teacher needs to work on his stamina.”
“You have until April 30 to watch this selection — Netflix”
Older young people play at younger young people, six episodes a day — how did I miss this show? — models given the gift of living twice, darling thieves of wiser words, hard-earned middle-aged insight unencumbered by bad knees or hernia, post-menopausal Truth now un-hot-flashed, now rehoused in pert vessels of improbable intelligence — it’s got to piss you off! All our bones stolen by twenty-seven-year-old fifteen-year-olds, un-wrecked Sexy Buddhas arsoning our kindling while we hyper-watch the blaze before it, too, is taken from us.
*
New doctors are like puppies. They have to play with all their toys and can be wildly cute. Fresh out of obedience school, all they know is rules and cutoffs; they cannot yet lay by the fire because they are the fire and have trouble being still. Old doctors, like old dogs, aren’t so eager. They know our secret heart, the love we’ve spent against coming back and smile as we wave So Long.
*
The coffee pot sticks a little to the warming plate. Sliding-glass door’s a bit rusty. I love it cracked open, lake-smell gets in, grass and summer rain, trees on the breeze — maybe the morning doves will come again. It’s good to feel stiff old shag, see stacks of books we’ve partly read, stacks and stacks. Your grandpa’s kitchen table, Ruth’s worn chair, dusty Mantovani on the player. Paintings hang crooked, curl on paneled walls, fading in memory and slow-days, that other house, the city one, already forgotten.
*
Of course we box our bodies, bury them underground, cold and silenced. Alone. Or burn them gray, all evidence scattered. After a lifetime as ours, why allow the thing we’ve starved and carved hated and baited — used abused accused assailed curtailed veiled failed jailed — to testify? It might never get off the stand!
*
Take a walk through the site menu. You might find something you like.
“You know how you tell a native
from a tourist?” asked the damp guy
not-nursing his scotch.
Why do they always talk to me?
I shrug my shoulders.
“Tourists talk.”
I shrug again,
leave twenty on the bar,
check the phone —
finish the bourbon, find the keys,
slide the ball-cap on backwards,
position steel-rimmed sunglasses,
hit the mirror,
and leave.
Tourist.
*
If there were other poems, they’d be HERE.
While I wait for the light, wonder which words to use — whether “immature” or “innocent” best conveys America — an unfortunate unhoused woman dies on the sidewalk cuddling garbage and a teddy bear — her last moment unhinged: it is too much, too much, this humanity; so she passes it on to the passersby — who sit in traffic with closed-up windows thinking “Poor Soul” thinking this is so sad thinking at least she’s in a better place unable to explain.
*
Sometimes it’s nice to sit with a book. Check them out HERE.
The grandmother never existed. I made her up — the convalescent home, the diabetes, a high school lie. Her name was Betsy, and she never asked for candy, or walked me through the Depression. Hand-made soap, aero-planes — the whole shebang kinda not true. But she was a good ol’ gal, always ready to listen to my teen-boy problems, so open to “these new-fangled relationships” — “It’s not like we didn’t mess around in our day,” she once said. “Just don’t get anyone pregnant!” She knew there was no girl, nodded when I told her how all my friends — you — stared at me like I had depth, like I was heroic just for visiting The Elderly. Well, Betsy would’a liked that. She would’a liked that just fine. If she had ever existed.
*
G Beckman 