To Pablo Neruda
It’s an unseemly, if not downright immoral middle-class complaint, I know, but writing all day on my expensive Trinitron screen, I can feel my body turn to crap. If I had to go out and be part of the harvest, bend over in a field in the open air, haul some water around—something. Not to the point where it’d kill me, the way I know that it can, but something. Anything but the modern-day gym with its clacking and counting. Shouldn’t labor lead deeply and meaningfully into bread and supper and company? Not just returning home day after day from the hardware of privilege, our bodies like spikes.
We’re not shining. We’re shiny. Like those magazines fat with their ads.
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It’s just that I, myself, am a long way from standing for death and transcendence in the eyes of a man. I’m lumpy and squat. If pain isn’t stabbing me in one of my joints, it’s throbbing like smog. Pablo, where are your gallant and succulent odes to the lonely old mothers? Where are your poems of mystical yearning for the broken down crones? Small roots spring forth all over from my body of eyes.
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Pablo, you glorious sob.
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Pablo, you stranger in love with your alien home. I feel you, dawg.
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Pablo, you spectacular sexual slobberpuss. I adore you. I adore you despite, or even because of, your regal stupidity.
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I’m not the center of anything. Don’t you know how longing for essence can spiral downright silkily into the utopian passions of fascism? I’m just saying.
Roses don’t do it anymore.
I’m sorry. Find another flower,
please. Anything.
Something odd, goofy, overlooked, and real. Do flowers
work for a living? I imagine they do. Until we see how others yearn, we don’t
see flowers and we don’t see others.
Nichols © 2003
Draft posted for temporary viewing.