A Trite United Nations of Lovers Part IV

Green Bird

I.

The rest of the smaller countries of lovers
meant nothing to me, just shadows left
on piano keys, black keys hiding the half of it.

And then there was you.
I used you like a Jager shot in a bar
to release my ginger.
Like he would have cared,
stupid girl,
but you did,
your belt buckle bright
as my white teeth against orange skin
baked in ignorance.

Your car was a trash mound in a desert.
We crawled over fast food bags
as though we were dumpster diving
in secrecy, as though we were free.

Your beer, glowing between your legs
like the bar sign illuminated
with cigarettes and cocaine.
We laughed at each other for being there,
but you saw nothing funny, nothing
irregular about the place as we added
to the shining sign with our snapshot.

And I watched you with that pool stick
in my drunkeness, never cared for your
smile or your kindness, just your aim.

You were a project like an Elizabethean
Globe Theater built from popsicle sticks.

And you needed and wanted to break
free like so many books on my shelves.
And I laughed when you crawled
from the passenger’s seat
into the driver’s seat because
your door was stuck like my mind
in a shallow ditch.

I smiled all along knowing what I could
make you, knowing my lineage
wouldn’t approve unless I made you.

So I had to mold you, had to be your God,
create you from clay, round you
off with dirt in a college you never
cared for, had to be your savior,
stab myself with my own
crown of thorns.

II.

I saved you from society’s so-called
ignorance. I won’t believe that.
Let’s go back to that bar,
back to the low class
away from these high zombies.

I rip my books from these modern
shelves like shoeboxes in the sky.
You bought these shelves
with your capital I wanted so badly.

The books now lie open on the floor,
pages becoming wrinkled,
they lie about like so many
flapping fish on the ground,
like so many dying soldiers,
and I am Indian style covering
my face with my hands,
sheltering it like an ibis,
breaths and tears playing relay.

I can see you in those books,
your suit I molded for you.
The two of you stand side by side,
old and new like modern décor
with an antique buffet.
Your tie weighs down the new you,
Republican weighs you down
although you care nothing for them
because I said so, prodigy,
because I said that all those white
collars blend together like capitalist
ignorance, like so many Christians
praying in a crowd and leaving
the bums in the gutters to die,
leaving them to their bottles and lines.

I told you that those numbers
were the poison of men’s symbolic
souls, and I know they used to be
my grand perfume, and every time
I read Washington Irving to my class,
I am reminded by Tom Walker
that I did not play the role of God
in molding you, but that I played
the Devil, Old Scratch.

And I threw you into the fire
of usurers like Beelzebub
attached to the leg of Satan.

III.

We no longer live in that haven
by the sea of our minds that we
created like a red hot dog
on the back porch of an ostentatious
house. I’ve never been anything
more than a cheap hot dog
served in a lavish restaurant.

Although influenced by Republican
spawned friends, we are neither
Republican or Democrat.

We are dystopians.

IV.

I’m not sure if we ever gazed
into each other’s eyes and felt
ecology’s butterflies.

I cannot remember most
of the last five years of my life
anyhow. I am purifying
myself in an attempt to see you.

Fasting.
Sitting under the Bodhi tree.

The Bible has become a pedestal
for my rolling eyes. I try to stop
them like I try to stop wanting this.

Documentaries and poetry and prose
fill my mind every night, pour
into me like our beer bong,
cabinet above the sink.
What did we feel besides nothing
when we drank from it like
our fountain of cures?
And I feel nothing and so much
right now with my books scattered
across this floor like plague bodies
with our portraits glowing
on the wall like a neon bar sign,
like a beer between your legs
the first night we met.

V.

And now I have killed you,
chopped you into pieces with my
actions, placed you into the stars
of my conscience where you
will live in an expensive tent,
stakes wide as our philosophies,
Thoreau’s book in a closet
behind my bandanas.

Like a lap dance in a wedding
reception, you curl into my mind,
fold into the depths of my own
philosophy, my religion which
we have neglected like stripes
on a flag, like many stars claiming
nationalism, like red words in a Bible.

You claim that’s our downfall,
the fact we stopped going to church
although you never really cared
for God, and I claim that life
is our downfall, that marriage
is the ultimate cause of divorce.

I said I’d never participate in their
nonsensical traditions. I’m ruled
like so many cages, by a family
that believes that shit while
I believe in my right to live,
believe in my right to be.

I just wanted to be together,
dwell together,
love each other aside
from the paper cage,
but we did.

We participated,
raised our hands
in a sea of normalcy.

VI.

I made up a cliché to get on without
you. I call it “nothing lasts forever,
not even life.” And I say that to feel
human, to feel a little less
Leviathan when people judge me.

And I wrote this to kill you,
to be rid of your memory section
by section, a new methodical project
like you standing as a blank
canvas shooting pool under
an illuminated sign.

I wrote this to kill you like Plath’s
bastard father, like so few tub
meditations soaked in literature.

And as I kill you, turn you cold
with this conglomerate of figurative
speech, my pen is suddenly set
in motion by a force of our neglected
God, our neglected love.

And I’m suddenly unsure how
to end it other than to become silent.