Love Song

Though I am more Che than Chavez, I am still a dove. I do not apologize to you. Or to the state of California. The IRS. New York. That administrator I bit in the third grade, who was delicious and sweet. I, oh, so cold. In the mind, the Dionysian defiles walls the Apollonian protects. I am always looking to take something down. Usually it’s me. Two bulls stand on a hill. The younger says, Father, let’s run down and fuck a cow. The father, wiser, longer in the horn, higher on the grass, reminds his son how Moses was also horned, beamed with light, that to handle a massive snake, to charm Pharaoh, to steal fire, to fly, to unzip the sea, is to speak and not tap vanity. Moses descended Mount Sinai with cracked slabs and saw a golden calf. The father said to the young bull, No son, let’s strut down and fuck them all. Thus begins the beef  between bird and bee, the isthmus isolating order from chaos. My mind is made up of so many different cuts of meat. My marbles stay as mixed as my metaphors. As my myths. As myself. At parties my favorite icebreaker involves asking strangers to describe themselves with three words. Their descriptions are a slipping away to change clothes. Identity and irony neatly knit in an ugly Christmas sweater. Sometimes I feel so Socratic: oft-laureled, poison-palmed, toga-partied, exasperated by the masses: I wouldn’t have guessed ambitious. Free-spirited, you don’t say. Other times I feel like the woman rambling among the vapors escaping the ground in Iceland’s volcanic canyon, making a bus an em dash in a rest stop, where some fifty-odd persons searching for themselves in true existentialism are yellow lupines growing on the side of the road. An epiphany can not be achieved, as a cedar waxwing cannot be more cedar qua waxwing. Eventually what we’re looking for appears. Sometimes incitation opens at the bottom of a straw, a spoon, a barrel of wine, the windfall happens while eating farfalle, while flipping through The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. At the moon me the animal roofs atop brownstones, sin vergüenza. Upwards our eyes scamper, a reflex action, when inserting an object in the mouth, even when the object is a gun. Over hills a road erodes the way home. Only after the Coast Guard has readied a helicopter, do we descend the cold volcano in Eldg já to realize we are the woman in the search party looking for ourselves. to poetry. In moments of ecstasy we are lifted At the shore of the Aegean Sea or at the banks of the river Evros, he loosened his sandals while Pegasus stamped the soil, crushing reeds and hoofing away stray wood. The sun bandaged light on a sky that would not heal. Perseus, with eyes heavenward, formed the shapes of gods into clouds, slipped his hand into the woven sack, and felt the flint of primped snakes. He thought, But it is the cold weight of scales that protects. As sure as a child, he lined leaves rocked to sleep by salt water waves for a bed, so as not to, with sand, or with hubris, bruise Medusa’s disunited head. One day, like a beam through skylight, we realize life is a puddle jumper of  tragedy. Some stones sink fast yet still hold light. So phantom are a statue’s busted arms and toes. Everything must go. And yet I still hanger hope when shopping the racks of discount stores. Veni vidi vici when I see Vince, freeze when I see the coiled coif of Versace’s emblem. Like Sisyphus, errybody think they headed for the top. Sing,started from the bottom, to my reflection in the dressing room mirror, now we here boy when I remember that Oh my god Becky, look at her butt passes the Bechdel test. I have eaten from the tree the fig that sullies and seen that the meat’s not always fair. I was, like Perseus and Sir Mix-a-Lot, born by a riv of water, felled by pride when a brown boy, tattooed with age, obsessed with fame, took his talents to Vermont to kiss trees and tap syrup from the sap. There and there and there, he kissed. Here and here he drank. So drunk he hugged an old white woman off the ground. None of the gods I love love me. To be tipsy is to leverage one’s self. Or so I’m told. The pulley is considered civilization’s highest achievement. Icarus killed himself being lifted.