poems i can't stop thinking about

just listened to The Moth while mopping the floor and one of the Moth story tellers was a (former) member of The West Memphis Three, young men accused of murdering three young boys in a Satanic ritual in the 80s. 

i’ve been doing research on the years 1984-1985 for the memoir i’m working on and a lot of my ‘research’ has been reading copies of Rolling Stone magazine from that time period (when it was published twice a month!). There are articles on Teen Cluster Suicides and on Suburban Teen Cult/Devil-Worshipping Killers. 

and i was thinking while listening to The Moth that we have to be careful when swept up in any big moral panic, or in any big new movement, because invariably, innocent people (like the young men wrongly convicted and put in prison for decades for the murder of the children in West Memphis) are falsely accused and punished in an effort to rid the world of evil, and in an effort to make ‘us’ feel safer. 

in the 80s ‘we’ feared young men/boys who read Stephen King books and listened to Iron Maiden and looked like they might worship the devil and dig up graves and kill little children in the woods. we feared day care centers because one in California was accused of being a cult and of sexually abusing babies/children in the name of Satan and devil worship. 

we feared heavy metal music would make young men kill themselves or each other or ‘us.’ 

when you feel fearful today, take any other time period in world history, do a small amount of research, and you’ll find fear is the most common way of controlling/political swaying/undermining confidence and autonomy, creating hysteria and irrational thinking. it also is usually based on very little ‘truth.’ maybe fear of the unknown is too scary and the fear of something more tangible - be it heavy metal music or devil worshippers - is more manageable. 

Reading The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson has been mentally taxing. This is not because it’s a bad read, it’s just so dense and written stream-of-consciousness. Nelson’s words are great, she makes wonderful arguments, and is able to describe how she thinks now while also crediting those who have led her to think the way that she does. I’m particularly fond of a few paragraphs from pg 50 to the top of 52. The ending quote here reads: “As if I do not know that, in the field of gender, there is no charting where the external and the internal begin and end – “(52).

& love me again—   don’t the pines die, too

& exactly          with our names

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Yves Klein | Monochrome rose