Underneath all proclivities and responses to life however is a substratum of fear and suffering. It can be engaged with or it can be ignored, but it is there nonetheless.
—Deborah Barlow
It's empty
stubbornly, violently empty,
this hole I keep tossing
myself into,
parts of me,
hair, fingers especially
eyelids, nails,
my tongue
the things I think I can
do without and still
get by on the street without jeers.
I have a whole bucket of parts here,
slopping around the slaughterhouse floor.
But that hole,
that whole hole,
isn't filling.
I'm ripping out the narrative
and laying it to dry,
next to my skin,
flipped inside out
so you can see the words backwards here,
on this beach
where I've lost my way.
And the part of my brain
that is still working
in cool starts and stutters
has finally figured out what
this is,
these marks on my skin,
this black under my nails,
this spasm from the wrist,
teeth-grinding,
It is the discomfort of being,
an existence that some of us
are disused to,
that cannot be tempered
by toys, or travel.
A voice that is always
there, telling us,
(not you of course,
this doesn't apply to everyone),
but telling those of us,
who eat our hair,
or carve little messages
in our skin,
that our choice,
our only choice
is engagement or ignorance
and that all the bits of you
you leave behind,
in vain,
aren't making any difference at all.
The kings are dying,
all the big stone gods are crumbling down
dissolving in water with failed kidneys and livers
from drinking and smoking
and laughing and fighting and fucking.
and words far, far too many words.
The kind of words that won't ever stop coming.
Until it all stops for good.
So for a change, I'm going to start a fire
something that will burn though this dark night
and take off my fingerprints
so that when I go back to you old house
and creep into your bedroom at night
cupping my hand just to feel once more
your quickly beating heart
you'll never know I was there.
This is what fire
unlike water
can do.
And like the Old Believers
I'll go out with a fire burst
a hot red cloud, like a hurricane
swirling from my belly.
A great cape of disappearance
a shrill howl.
Just me and the great Hercules
building our own funeral pyres.
All my hair snuffed out,
my skin blackened and curling like ribbon,
my bones just gravel.
This body is all that I have, all that any of us
are ever going to get.
So maybe we should all go together, like Frankenstein
before we realize that nothing is going to be the same.
Before we fall back into acceptance and can no longer marvel over
the first snowfall, over the velvet softness that comes before the seizure,
over the hiccup and scratch of slave chants on record.
We'll smell that great wood burn
and we'll leap for it.
I will call you Sati
and you will fall with unstoppable grace into the fire.
And the whole world will fall in love with you
over and over
again.
Ally Malinenko has previously been published by Alembic, Blind Man's Review, Small Brushes, Whiskey Island Magazine, The Unknown Writer, HeART, Mad Poets Society, Posey, Jack Magazine, Words-Myth, Pens on Fire, Sugar Mule, The New Yinzer, Zygote in My Coffee, Delirio, Orange Room Review, Why Vandalism?, Mad Swirl and Gutter Eloquence. She is also a contributing poet to Reading Ground Blogazine. Her first book of poems, The Wanting Bone, was recently published by Six Gallery Press.
Comments (closed)
Holly
2009-12-04 10:11:20
This is amazing poetry. I will read them again because I'm sure I've missed a thing or 2.
Thank you.
Bill Will
2009-12-09 23:36:44
Finally! Interesting and fresh poetry on the web!