Don’t Give Back the Other Story

– Asparagus Beetle –

Stanley chews pits, eats spears. He’s metallic blue-black with yellowish square spots and red along the margins if you want to approach him metaphorically, and impossible to tell apart if you don’t. His children seem slug-like, their ideas taking at least a week to hatch.

His ship is still sinking. The fat wide country of yellow and returning is his, the man with a million fingers.

You could have discovered Hazel in her boots if you were Stanley.

She listened long enough to hear nothing. And the nothing traded awakenings and went back to sleep.

From the next room I could hear my computers looking for more intimate attention, claiming they remember when my typewriter slept there and dragged me out of bed to have a serious talk.

Naked priests were already admiring the hairy bluster of Stanley’s raspberries, wondering if the hair too might seem to disappear when someone royal indulges.

If your thinking leaves your eyes alone, they will begin thinking on their own. Perhaps this has already happened.

And yet we are not here for existence, but for potential existence.

Now think with your eyes. Listen to them. Touch them gently but with confidence when they are absent.

Blue sounds off as if clouds were not deceptions, as if rain could be considered a conveyance. The translation assumes its falling within every version. There’s a new face in each droplet. Every other version pays attention. The rain is an announcement. Anyone could win. Anyone could announce another unique dampness knocking on another door.

Disagreement wins its argument with loneliness because loneliness will argue with itself, believing it has won, when the opponents are saying the same things to each other.

***

Rich Ives’ books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press–poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York—fiction chapbook), The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books–stories), Old Man Walking Home in the Dark (Cyberwit-poems), A Servant’s Map of the Body (Cyberwit-fiction), and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press–hybrid).