10.21.2020

not the empty truth when I was empty But the full truth when I wasn't

Dear Lady of the Winter, style is joy 
I am sitting here with my stomach full of love 
In New York City, I am ready to board the train
In the morning, my pink bags all packed
With crisp white linens, the things I wear
Not like the time in the morning when I visited the shopkeeper in California
Not like the time when I was in California, in the morning light
But love, the true kind
All joy has a little style
That is the one thing that you are forgetting
When you write poems so full of blood and guts
They are so real except they aren't
Because they aren't poems really
And every poem full of blood and guts
Must be stylized to be so
Not the time in the morning when I was crying
But the time in the morning when I wasn't
When I wasn't crying
Cause I knew I had found true love
Not the empty truth when I was empty
But the full truth when I wasn't
When I wasn't empty enough to have a stylized shell
Not your empty life you write down with no mediation
But a full life full of love
That I write down with partial mediation
Not the whole truth of bitterness with no bitter shell
But a full life of bitterness with no empty shell
But a joyous and colorful one
But a black one so black
It is hard and fast
Honed by years of thinking
I mean years of thinking
Not anger or sadness
Not bitterness in the morning with some fat slob in California who loves his girlfriend
Not the empty sadness of three days fucking some empty slob who loves his girlfriend
I am talking about Sunday sadness with ties and ribbons
I am talking about a life of being beaten and then a day spent in costumes
I am talking about children, the children
Who cry out in their stylized laughs
At what a great grand world this is
So pretty in its sunshine that comes on down
On you when you are ready to receive it
The concentrated yellows of bluish sunshine
The sunshine on your face and neck
Your party dress, French vignettes in Egypt
Spent all night wrapped up in tight verse
And underneath 
All the crescendos of language
That couldn't show you things more real
Than when they are smart to do so
In rhymes so pretty that they hurt
The sunshine that is so yellow
It comes from a tight yellow sun
That sits, a freakish circle
Packed and wound with painful circuits
Of light, the wires of black and orange
That tight yellow orb we see spilling
It is sitting as simply
As one yellow pebble
On fire so much that it is solid and simple
Just one yellow circle so solid and simple
Cause it is on fire so ferociously that it cannot be bothered
To raise a fuss
I am talking about one yellow circle
On fire so much
In the plastic blue sky
That it is joy
Real joy
Stylized and static joy
The kind that comes only from the moon
The kind of plastic joy that comes only from the moon
Or the greater heavens we can't imagine
They are so vast
They might as well be called joyous.
Even when we try to explain them
The only thing we can say in their vastness
Is something simple

[Dorothea Lasky {1978- } 'Style is Joy' from Black Life]

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