Author: benightedtraveler

benightedtraveler https://theprosepoem.wordpress.com I am a benighted traveler like you.

Platonic Fridge

You get so wise
talking to the plant
about the grilled cheese sandwich
you are making
in the middle of the night
all about guilt.
Cheese.
You think your thoughts
are mostly stolen
animal products too.
The moon in the window
is also a thief.
All light feels stolen,
if light is property
which seems a sacred idea
about shoplifting
the divine.
The moon in the night
like a yearbook in your mind
quietly assaults you.
You turn the sandwich
as a lover turns
a lover in a drawing
you can’t stop tasting
before you actually taste
yourself forbidding yourself.
Before you are the moon,
its shoddy accounting
and what it did with light
for billions of years
that it can’t explain
or won’t in this court
because it doesn’t even understand
it is a dark body
with accountability
to other darkness.

Eating Them

Sometimes there is armor on the plate
The animal’s armor is there with it
It is nature’s wit
The colors emblazon on a shell
You go crazy with desire
Which protected the creature
Sometimes there are eyes looking up at you
Hunger is what you stare at
From defeat the aqueous eyes stare
Sometimes
You peel the skin back and then decide to eat it
You don’t see hairs in the skin which would be thorns
The skin is deliciously burnt
By desire and calculation
You lick your fingers
Thorns in the sensibility
Of a creature inside you assaying
The lightness of the things you do
The shame of devouring
What ticks off youth’s clock
But flavor is flavor
Flavor is the port of desire
Hunger lies on the plate of the mind
And it is a dead thing
Until it awakes like a snake on the plate
And it sidles between the flowers
That cover the dining table
Who are also dead
And many of the people dining with you
In fact,  those on either side of you at the table
Are also conveniently dead
They bob as if on vessels and they are
Feeding you and feeding on you
Yet you won’t scream
Because you are so hungry
And this is the right place to sit
So much nourishment is speaking here

Turt

There is a way to be curt with a field. The runnels of self-pity, the sludge of preponderance. I don’t use words aright, alway. I am dumb as a post. I mean dead as  a post.  A goat cast asunder a ship. The sounds come out wooden. This must be the sea left over. I went where the sea met the mud, the slag of the alluvial guts of some dragon-sing, the earth’s spit and image. So I am curt with the field, a-winter the shelved bark I gnaw like a scarab come home. And that is me protesting love. I mean into you a field of sound. Green as.

Deep

Deep, impersonal bridge
no longer used,
isolated, broken in bits,
I salute thee,
half-deadly and boring,
the kids loved to visit you,
to smoke, kill things, cry at clouds
they thought about too long,
have their first kiss,
maybe first something more,
ask who Cindy Sherman is,
first groundhog shot
and furtherama of tears,
self-torture, lotteries
of the souls of other people,
sleeping with them,
owning them, being owned,
abandoning pets
who probably died alone,
and finally,  one of them
left hanging from it,
while the others
weathered on
into age, nostalgia
for being where no one
would ever think to look for you.

here is a field

after H.D.

here is a field
and here there were people
which means charged space
in a void,
which means charged space
and steeplejacking
of some sort

here is a field
and here there was a field
which means echo sound
of echo feeling
and steeplejacking
of a natural sort

here is a field
and a glass of water
frozen on a stump
somewhere in that field
as a demonstration of method,
of indistinguishable mind,
and the glass waits
only to freeze to the stump,
to give the universe punctuation,
not a bad thing

lastly, here is a field
of vampires, of feeling
frozen on a stump
somewhere in that field
as a demonstration of passion,
a sort of Ark with funny animals
that even children somehow know,
troublesome animals
in the sense they must be loved
or at least amuleted

and that is the beginning of justice.

Royal Scam

A window that cared deeply
about the railroad in its breast.

There was a Catherine wheel in the back yard
and a Cassandra in the guest house, paid.

All our forks were wooden.
But all our knives were copper.

This created an incredible sexual tension
between our implements at mealtime.

Later, we gilded even the mice
we beheaded in our traps.

This was when we really arrived.
This was the glorious period in which

nobody knew us

(but the ferrets that slunk
around our naked breasts).