an accident with injuries.
I thought I’d die without him,
on some sort of stage-set, propped
and spot-lit, soap operatic.
But all the evidence was against us:
few animals mate for life in the wild,
girls on the radio sound sassier but not happy,
I’m attached to my own last name.
Maybe I should have read more fairy takes as a child;
I read a lot of Vonnegut.
Bedroom is an anagram for boredom.
I heard this on the radio. Passion and suffering
share the same root, and this can’t be a coincidence.
Love is fire, love is heat. Females leak,
and people are plants.
Seeing is touching.
Staying alive is a contest.
Can someone unloved early and thoroughly
love back? All those studies about infants untouched
by their mothers. The someone is the speaker.
At first our hands have no urgency.
The other parts, once we’ve begun the fumblings,
friction into their own momentum
and save us.
The truth is, underneath
I have no negotiating power,
being born blue-early and a year too soon,
set in a hot box, skinny limbs warmed by a lamp.
Kept apart and unheld, electricity
was my mother-love, and now,
bodies falter.
Time is a devourer, healer, evaluator.
Time is a pursuer, reaper, thief.
My welcome mat reads I never met a man
I couldn’t leave.Like my other public declarations
it’s mostly bluff and exoskeleton,
but no one comes and knocks at night.
When love ends, we break up.
We crack up in the loony bin.
The parlance is not so disparate;
the severings are similar.
It’s always three A.M. and love,
the only language I have for you
is paradox and loss, and mean--
as in small, and stingy.
The word happy is kin to luck and chance.
Today it rained and even the garbage
in the courtyard looked scrubbed,
and the neighbor’s windowsill row of sunflowers
stretched their necks to the sun, dripping,
and I could have loved anyone at all, forever,
for a half-hour.
My tombstone to read:
Restless, restless, restless.
[Courtney Queeney, from Filibuster to Delay a Kiss - ‘The Anti-Leading Lady’s Self-Defense’]
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