Jeremiah Chapter 5 is Hard To Write About

It is. It is so hauntingly beautiful. I guess that sounds strange, because the chapter is about injustice and war, but I have just been chanting it to the rthym of the rain*, feeling it reverberate within me like pheonix music in Harry Potter. (I feel kind of lame making a Harry Potter reference in blog-life. Oops.)

Everyone is either freaking out about the hurricane, or trying to ignore it. This is a night when one looks out the window and thinks, "How magnificent are your works God". This is a night when one shares beauty with a stranger, and epiphanies melt like orgasms into the night air. It is a night when the winds crawl up your thighs.

This is a night when, after numerous mistypings, I finally get connected to the link with Jeremiah chapter 5, and decide to cheat on my own assignment, because, like a storm, sometimes words suffer when humans try to tame their beauty:

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1105.htm


* I can never manage to spell that word correctly. I blame you, Spell-check!

"Why did you sleep with me?" she asked.
"I was curious" he replied, as he licked her lipstick off of his bottom lip. He could see the blue walls, and her bare back with black hair peeking out from the white sheets, reflected in the mirror like an odalesque. "I wish Rembrandt were here", he mused. "Really? I would have thought our relationship is much more Renoir." He laughed. "Since when have you ever been interested in art history?" "Since I made out in the Temple of Dendur." He laughed again, then started searching for his hat.

He looked so handsome, his carved cheekbone and grey eyes crinkled together as he squinted across her bureau. She hated him at that moment, a hatred that started in between her thighs and spread throughout her entire body. "You have to be attracted to someone to hate them", she had always said, and he had always laughed, and asked if she thought that the US merely had an S&M fetish for Bin Laden. "I don't appreciate your sarcasm.", she would say. "Maybe I am just jealous because you don't hate me yet", was his reply. For that, she never had an answer, but would avert her eyes, the way she had when she was a little girl and came across sex scenes in movies. He, on the other hand, had always looked - "That's why I am so knowledgeable", he joked, stroking her hair and squeezing her thighs.

But now, she could see that his hands had moved with surgical precision through her body - expert and cold - detached. Now that he had finished the operation, he was meticulously collecting his supplies; the only hint that he had been there would be a slight crease in her new sheets, the way that on the operating table, it is only the faint smear of blood on the gurney that tells the patients' story - at least until the nurse comes in with a bottle of alcohol, swabs the metal, and is gone, leaving the space gleaming and silent, waiting for the next body to lie on its flat stomach, hungry for the taste of bones and thighs.

Conversation Fragment

"I miss him", she said, "you have to save me."
"Why do you miss him?"
"What's the reason any woman misses a man? Because he's good in bed."
Sherry shot her a scathing look. Sometimes Sarah forgot that she was gay.
"Sorry - I meant - I know that was hetero-normative."
"It's ok", Sherry sighed, placing her hand on the back of Sarah's shoulder. Her hand stayed there a moment too long, and when she lifted it, the look between them was awkward.

Nearby, the fountain fluttered, and the trees were silent. Not the listening type of silent - it was more like they were asleep, dreaming, oblivious to the silly human dramas taking place beneath their branches. Sarah stared at the water.

"What are you thinking?" Sherry asked.
"How much fun it would be to flow away, seething into the earth like a lost dream."
"God you're deep" said Sherry, taking a drag from her cigarette.
Sarah shrugged. "I try", she said.

Their kiss tasted like raspberry.

Meta-ness Once More: I Feel Positively Post-Modern

Aside from the cliched and pretensious heading, written by a lady who can not spell "pretensious", I have a few notes on my poem from the previous post:

1. This poem was inspired by a moment in Central Park in which I did in fact dissect a man, but not like a frog. I was merely admiring his behind.

2. The "bald"/mold rhyme is slant, but in my head it was a perfect rhyme, because I actually pronounce the word "bald" like "bold", in order to overcome my natural inclination to pronounce it bau-wd, which is how it sounds in a Brazilian accent (au dipthong + ls are pronounced like ws if they follow vowels). I actually had to go to speech therapy at age six to acquire an American accent. I guess its interesting, the way someone's pronunciation can influence their poetry - that's why a lot of Middle English poetry doesn't work unless you know how to read it - accents and pronunciations have changed. It's why we have words like "winged", with little accents over the e.

3. I have also been reading a bit of Edna St. Vincent Millay recently. Her poetry is a bit more structured and rhyme-y, and I feel that crept into this poem. Also, currently (re-)reading the book "Western Wind" - the only poetry textbook I ever liked.

I am watching images of battles in Libya on TV as I write this. I have gone from feeling post-modern to feeling surreal within the span of one blog post.

Break-up Poem

"To you, love means dissecting a man like a frog." - Anonymous, Central Park, 2011.

I dissect your spindly legs
that once were made of gold.

Now they are a slimy green,
reminding me of mold.

Once I kissed your curly head,
and whispered you were mine.

Now I wish that you'd grow bald,
and saggy from behind.

Once I loved, beneath your bed
and in between your thighs.

Now my dear, I do not hate -
I merely despise.

Revenge

"Goodbye.", she said, sticking out her hand, "it's been nice faking orgasms with you."

As his hand continued to pump hers, he had no reply. His smile was still frozen when she closed the door, like the idiosyncratic lips of a foreign character in a dubbed movie, the sound ending always just a second too soon, leaving the only sound in the theater that of a teenage girl's hands rubbing up against the inside of her new boyfriend's thigh, her hands chafing against the cloth of his trousers.

When the sound comes back on, he has grown soft in her hands, his adolescent body unaccustomed to the touch of fingers other than his own. He stares at the screen and laughs too loudly, just as you now stare at the door behind her. Have you forgotten how to act when the curtain falls? You remember the night at the theater, her shoulders in between your arms, how she smelled of jasmine. You remember applauding, your hands getting stuck in her hair. She was the only one who insisted on an encore, and you felt that mix of shame and pride that comes when you realize your girlfriend has been marked by an audience.

"I went to see the theater, but instead we were put on stage", you whispered, and you thought she would find that charming. She didn't - which is why you are standing here, staring at an empty stage, when the actress has already left the theater. Maybe if you rub a rabbit's foot against your cheek for good luck, she will come back to you, stick to your skin like rouge, whisper that you were her best lover.

After a few minutes, he decided that she was a bitch and went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee.

Beauty

I used to feel beautiful: Swathed in white lace, bedecked in blue willow patterns, I sank into the wall like an ornament ashamed of its own glory. I grew bored of the shelf, fell onto tables, shattered. And each time, her hand coming down to piece me back together again, with crazy-glue and scotch-tape, each rendition of my form slightly uglier than before, as I became an imitation of a mockery of a rewrite, and the vase's original shape and hue were lost in the veils of adhesives that stung my tongue. I grew to know the contour of each finger, to hate the taste of salt beneath her nails, to bite at the cuticles.

Now I lie on the shelf once more, preening each glistening of jade in the sunlight, ruffling each inch of faience that still shines, longing for the days, when, like a sleepy peacock, I tried to hide my own glory - longing for the days when I still had glory to hide.