figments

you breathed hot rot, honey rhizome creeping over and about the twilit fog and home of ghosts, holding, wandering - you unraveled skein by skein the pain woven so tight, leaving ends unaccounted for a tangled knot in the wake of clearing what else is there to be said now? our work was finished, at some point, the way most paintings simply stop being painted the way abandoned houses one day were left - couch covers old diaries, coffee pot half brewed - who knows why we leave what we leave behind i've been in forensics too long evaporating dissecting the long dead smelling of formeldahyde and pink preservation

do you ever study insects in amber, wondering how the suffocation went? warm, thick, pulling, pulling limb by limb, you into a pool of gold.

It does work to disrupt unhelpful behavior

“SURVIVAL: STRATEGY

As the energy of the men decreases, the faggots and their friends come aboveground. They know they do not have much time before the men will notice. So, as quickly as they can, they begin to arrange themselves into an intricate new world. They need access to food and warm spaces, to hiding places, to excitement, and to each other. The great gardens of the fairies begin to expand, producing food in abundance. The fairies shower the plants with so much love that the plants, with gratefulness, produce all they can. Spaces to be in begin to be created around the great gardens, warm, woody spaces, softly illuminated. The faggots, passing as men, procure spaces all over the devastated city. Although the men have divided all the city space up and given each space a name so it can only be used for one purpose, the faggots turn everything they can get into spaces to live in and to eat in and to love in. The queens elaborate their dens in the rubble to create hidden places where one can live for long periods of time safe from the cold, sharp eyes of the men. And they elaborate their forms of outrage.”

“Calamus Books, like its namesake, went under after the world it loved– the world it was published for– drowned before its eyes. AIDS claimed The Faggots and Their Friends, along with the utopia in its pages and the corporeal world it had been written for. But as the book itself states, the faggots follow no leaders, only the dead. They yearn for connection to memories encoded in their bones. I stopped believing in coincidences some time ago, and it was certainly not a coincidence when a friend discovered this book for the first time, neglected at a rummage sale, and rushed home to share it with me. I could say the same about finding it again miraculously, years later, buried in a box in a warehouse, overlooked and waiting to be unearthed. This text reaches to us through time, a soft rustle on the wind.  A song so subtle that most would mistake it or miss it all together. But those who know

to listen will hear this song of lament. We receive and transmit that whisper of another world so that our friends may, in turn, trace a thread through time. 

the gnomes of the community gather around where i sit, all looking at me and exchanging glances with each other, none of them speaking the obvious. i can no longer stay here, now that i am not their size. but i was part of their community. i became one of them, indistinguishable from these people only from my past. how am i supposed to return to the world of the humans now? there is no life left for me there. that is not a life where i may fish for minnows in a babbling brook and feast off a bounty of raspberries. i am distraught. i cry.

my community comforts me. friends, all minuscule to me now, pat me wherever they can reach, nimbly dodging the tears that fall from my face. one of them offers me water. they don't have any containers that are big enough for me, they apologize, so just this acorn cap filled with morning dew will have to suffice.

i take the acorn cap and look at it in my hands. it is so small now. with a sniff, i put it atop my head.

Because I realized after a couple of meetings that my moments of baffled distress during them were centering around a pattern of our votes electing by majority to reject most of the good, interesting stuff and agree to publish the very bland.

So I was looking around this room of people I mostly liked or respected if not both, trying to figure out what the fuck when there was no reasonable way of asking, until the day we by majority vote sent definitely the best thing submitted all year back pending 'revisions' which of course would not be made, because the poet would definitely either become demoralized or know for damn sure she was too good for our stupid journal. I have no idea which it was; it's a question of mindset, and the submissions were anonymous.

This good poem was rejected for two reasons, both of which were actually manifestations of it being good. One was that it had made a couple of the board uncomfortable--not by having any shocking subject material, mind, just by provoking emotions with unusual descriptive language and indirectness--and they'd transmitted that uneasiness throughout the group during discussion.

And the other, seized upon as an excuse in light of the first, was that by being complex in terms of both structure and notion it had drawn several of us in, interested enough to engage critically and respond in depth, and so we'd marked it up with lots of places we thought a word choice could have been a little stronger, a line break had been a little odd; ways we thought it could have been a more excellent version of the poem we perceived in it. None of them ways it was actually bad. Just places we felt it could have been better.

At the same meeting, we voted to accept a poem that was an utterly tepid rectangle of predictable nothing-in-particular, because no one could find anything in it to object to.

It wasn't good. It wasn't noticeably bad, either, though; it was one consistent level of mediocrity clear through, and thus no part of it stood out as a weakness, and therefore the committee found it more acceptable than the poem that was superior in every way, but which by being daring and interesting had left itself covered in vulnerable places.