#fixed form

While Yellow Day Breaks to Grey Night

In cool, soft grass, freshly mown,

my lover lies among the clear green tone.

She’s looking up to bright blue skies,

with yellow sun reflecting in her eyes,

like all its warm light were for her alone.

A cloud floats by, strong, wide, alone --

she carefully watched how in time it’s grown

and covered fields where its dark shadow lies.

While clouds are making yellow day break to grey night.

My lover’s eyes, still, never turn to stone;

She keeps her ground despite how winds are blown.

My lover never turns from stormy skies;

She stands strong when another loudly cries.

She’s bright and strong without a single groan

She gathered the lights from the islands and sewed them into a dress,

It fluttered in the wind, though hems were holy and hapless.

The words they spoke were like those he had written in a notebook,

they were unfamiliar but nonetheless warm,

like soil in the summertime, where roots

lay their strange arms across the land, before the shovel rends them apart.

They are small, gangly, and though it doesn’t take much to rend them apart

it takes ages to get their stains from that old dress.

He figured that’s what they get for sinking their teeth through the root,

for their disregard, their endless consumption, their hapless

and hopeless days spent piercing their veins that did nothing but rest in the soil, warm

and unassuming. They took their alien blooms and pressed them in their notebooks.

He would have preserved her like that if he could’ve, pressed her between notebook

pages. When he needed her he would rend them apart,

letting the pulpy shreds fall to the floor. She would present herself to him, warm

and unassuming. She would still be wearing that island light dress.

This thought, he knew, was ill advised, hapless,

he wanted for nothing but to stretch his arms around her, fingers interlocking like roots.

It felt like the countryside had iced over, the warm soil where the roots

resided, dead, could’ve swallowed his body whole. All he’d leave was a notebook

of niceties, of garden layouts he would never plant, of his hapless

and scrawny limbs. In no time, the Earth would rend him apart,

returning his flesh to where it had come from. But instead he would dream of the dress,

made of light from the islands. He would dream of warmth.

The sun and moon never iced over. The shovels, the stains, the icy countryside would warm,

he would greet the sunny season with a new respect for the roots.

Hung on a hanger in the cellar doorway, the old dress,

and resting on the cellar stairs, the old notebook,

would serve as a reminder but never again rend him apart.

Sprouts in the soil would finally flower, no longer helpless or hapless.

Crawling out of bed to meet the mist had been so helpless and hapless,

before the countryside had been graced by the sun’s warmth.

But now branches bore fruits so ripe that he would rend their flesh apart,

no longer tearing thanklessly into alien blooms, strange roots.

The fresh pulpy pages of a new notebook

were filled with scrawl that was thankful to the Earth and soft lines of a dress that didn’t exist.

And those soft lines would fade as he stopped peering down the cellar stairs at the dress,

as he stopped brushing through the pages of the unplanned gardens in the old notebook.

The word bisexual is dirty and untrue, an intemperate construct for passing.

Bi folk are not real folk— deluded and lying, they swing undecided between two sides.

Confused imitators going through the motions, incapable of commitment or truth.

Lustful chicanery brands them. Fidelity eludes them. Sure identity ditched them.

Players and pretenders— bait and switch panderers— they excuse promiscuity with Pride.

Pity bisexuals: their casual passion alienates them from real love and trust.

They want partners. They want sex—they want to couple but don’t want to be a couple. They leave.

Callous connotations berate bisexuals— words that don’t describe so much as efface:

unfixed— experiments— just a phase—corrosive claims muzzling those they purport to name.

So to whom do our bodies belong? The magazines shape my mind. Mannequins lifelessly posed like the fashions written in Vogue.

The magazines shape my mind, drawing me toward the models. Like fashions written in Vogue my lines need to be with the show.

Drawing me toward the models, pondering all the diet pills; my lines need to be with the show, my curves have to know where to go.

Pondering all the diet pills and the bodies that are right: My curves have to know where to go, when to be round and when to be toned.

All the bodies that are right, that display how contours should look (when to be round and when to be toned), how much should be skin and how much bone.

That display, how contours should look, of models and celebrities: how much should be skin and how much bone, plastic or silicone.

Of models and celebrities we talk, and desperately aspire. Plastic or silicone? How much remains our own?

We talk and desperately aspire to shapes distributed by society. How much remains our own? What lines of my mind are disposed?