Chris STROFFOLINO
Monster
A wise guy once told me memory is supposed to provoke desire as if a failure
to confront the past means you're repressed. A little later I found out he
ran a memory factory and was trying to enlist me and must have been somewhat
successful insofar as I am remembering his supercilious grin. But I can
remember only him; he blocks my view of other memories so I get fired by
convincing myself I quit which doesn't mean I can't take the tour and watch
from a catwalk those working at the vat in which I could fall without being
burnt. And I do, and I when I do I get covered in a kind of gunk that might
be edible, or was until I contaminated it. Its contents caked onto my clothes
like a full-body facial so I rushed home to wash it off by rolling on (like)
an unremembered floor.
Alacrity While You Sleep
20 flights ain't much to climb
if your blood is pumping with the viciousness
which so often seems to precede
the generosity some call desire.
A moment passed, it felt like years
in order to feel like a second.
The flesh was acting like a professional again.
He became me and scared her away
But what do you waste your life on?
you whose love is purer
than all the previous ones
my love was purer than,
you whose love seems purer than mine
you who I presume innocent
in hopes of being proven not guilty.
You who are more of a mystery naked
than ever they were clothed.
When naked they are but your clothes
(and when I say this is more than enough for me
the slight cry that wishes you were less
grows smaller each second
as if bringing it up
helps it go away quicker).
You who meet me on the 10th
Do not feel you're wasting your time on me.
Café Grey Dog Blues
In my dreams, a sin tax on McDonalds
In your nightmares, the energy crisis back in fashion.
Facts may burn holes in me no less than you
And must be faced, or refaced
Without resort to skeleton
Or shroud in pickled gloom.
Starvation may indeed help—up to a point
That stabs to bend, and descend
From the cacti at dawn
In the doctor's cushy solarium
To become the room
Without having to kill that which thrives in it
Which others will dub your very self
A highway of fragments, of numerous
On ramps and off ramps of evasion
That cannot be evaded unless sex
Is to be a dummy of pure anxiety
Unable to compromise or cry
With the warm voice of having been
Fondled, mistaken, and thrown for a loop
Like a slab of meat for the dog
Shining in the sky like the earth
As seen by no Venus but Mars
In which loyalty is one with love
And gravity's garage band lures you
Out of the giant steps of your spacesuit
Where history is too much of a machine to be sneezing
Mirror Star
My mirror doesn't like what she sees
Or what she neither sees nor can touch, in me.
This could drive me to despair
Were I not so engrossed in the brightness
And beauty of my mirror,
A brightness that might as well be in the eye of the beholder
And that maybe I make by finding
And not just because I had to sell my own
To be able to buy the time in which to find her
As I happily derail from the tracks money makes
Which she wishes I was never on
For even the mere memory can steam her
So I can't live in her so well
When music's mirror is no longer
The fairest of them all
Lacking arms unless she lends them hers
Which she would never do
Unless it can flow like blood
From and to the lung-part of the heart
That cleanses it, or through the veins
Of the horse it would never ride
Unless it can steer. It, not I,
The control freak. She and I the horse,
The two actors in the horse costume
And nothing's doing
Like shedding another layer
Of emperor's new skin
I only know as my mirror tells me.
She cannot be the only one,
Though I'll give hers the benefit of the doubt
While comparing it to mine
Knowing she must look at herself
In other mirrors than me
Even as I imagine her looking at me
When I stare into mine from the perspective
Of what a comfortable conformist
Would call the crazy dreams he threw away
Which is the mirror of music
I'm not going to accuse of money