Incandescence wrote:America—what's it mean
to be you? I am struggling
to keep up with a city
that never sleeps, and I am falling
behind the drifters and the homeless
in their footsteps. I am both
too ugly and neurotic for a home
for the beautiful and the brave—
the open, welcome limitations
of a land so vast and bodily, and body
so small and prancing, happily
spinning—the liveliest of equilibriums
sustained by the perennial vertigo
of going in, of going in secret,
of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge or,
without words, the Bridge of Sighs.
I am too light for the moon
that blows through your black streets
and too tall to wear my sadness
like a garment; in my being, you have striped
and stripped me of my major things,
and yet when I think of you reading
this poem (will you read it?), I do not want
you to be taken captive, separated by a wire
mesh lined with glass from your life itself,
like some Elektra, like you are still a dream.
And anyway, the actions of life turn out
not to be many—the bridges as they are
and the going and the secrets—
and when my lover dishonored me,
I saw that dishonor is an action as well,
and whether from patriotism or isolation
like a sickness, it causes the vocal chords
to swell. I went booming through your cities,
under and over your bridges, but he was gone,
concealed in your womb.
Later that day
I telephoned his brother—What's wrong
with your voice? he said, and I hung up
as the small shiny planes of the landscape receded
from my second-story window, bleary-eyed
and wearied, and I walked out to the ocean
(either of them will do) where I watched as the water poured
from the violent Atlantic into a softer Pacific,
like two vessels in a thirst, plainwater lust. America,
there is a moment when the water
is not in one vessel or the other—
and what a thirst it is—it is that moment
when I feel most alone here, and most at home:
when the plate grows darker and the homeless
are illuminated by the moon; it is when
I am my ugliest and most neurotic—it is when
matter stumbles out from its forms.
This is amazing! Just split it up into stanzas and now it's perfect love the orginality of it. Overall: You get a star. Great poem.
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Listening to: Finger Eleven - Suffocate
via FoxyTunes
i also felt like i was reading one big rant about america. i have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say about america, and plenty of the stuff you put here seems random.
