Poem of the Month

The purpose of this writing is to pluck the fruit. Les fruits. Des fruits. Fru-its.

Leave me alone, Nietzsche, your aphorisms telling me one way, then the next, your contradictory sentiments, your unphilosophical philosophy, your hardness, which I love too well. I gave my hardness to a bourgeois boy with a doctor wife. Do all rejected people secretly feel they are superior to the one rejecting them?

I came out here, six months ago, in bliss, to write by my parent’s poolside. There was a novel. It was happening.

Oh, good thing no one has married me. Wouldn’t I be the saddest wife? No one wants a sad wife.

My name would be nested at the middle of the table. My big fat father would hover in his muscle shirt. The legs of the tables would attach to my mother in law and sister in law and I would be sacrificed to the family, like a turkey.

I would come here, from across a far distance, to tell you something. I am the voiceless voice, the sin of sons, I am joy in your bosom.

In this time of psychic excesses, what else to do but siphon it into art?

I have heard the call of the miracle cure. It was coming down the long hall. It was effervescent, ever ready. It had a hard hat and hard timing of staying afloat. It couldn’t look at us. It did not have coordinates for directed movement. It was a mass of particles. We did not know where to put it or where to hide it. I was coming, unconsciously, down the corridor of images.

And progress wept. In me. The last of the long gods disappeared, following out a gray cloud to the West. I stood in a field of bodies and screamed my hollow hole to the last chroniclers. They were dancing the dance of Baccus, but had no joy. I felt how still the earth was, and forever would be from this moment.

I felt how good, how golden, I had planned to be. And how the gray skin seemed instead to say, “No one may be golden in a gray world.”

I have no eyes, save the eyes that see particles and parts.

Do you know how important you are to this world? How much they need you? You are not just some schmuck sitting in a suburb and contemplating death. You have the Grand Mission to them. The voice, the help, the responsibility. Sweet succor. Nietzsche said people needed to suffer more, not less.

Beware the handsome voice, the courteous voice, the nascent voice.

Beware the pleasant afternoon, the pleasant morning, the pleasant fuck.

Beware the dream that doesn’t awake you in cold steam, or with hate in your heart.

Beware the dogged doggerel of egolessness.

Beware technique. Beware trend. Beware answers.

The pretty small palms by the blue kidney shaped pool in Seminole, FL are not suburban trees, no suburban water, not suburban sky, but the same self-composed solar system of grandeur as the nebulae and must not be assumed to be pleasant.

The rest of the world cuts out for me.

I waver between jealousy and disdain of those happy actors who act their parts so well.

In cities, love is more intense, because the pain of daily living is nearly excruciating.

I don’t know where to go, or why life should be such a game of shifting floors.

-Nina Alvarez