The Future Was A Secret That Winked In Their Eye Once

I didn't really think that everybody made it when I was a kid.
I kind of did, but not really.
Still, I kind of did, though.

I used to hang out with these people,
and I had this idea that we would be quietly famous.
One day in ten or twenty or thirty years,
we would look back and write about the things we did,
like Kerouac and all the beats.
Our time together was the beginning of some kind of history.
We were each a point around a boundary
that would one day describe our movement through creation.

But we don't all make it.
This is all we get,
and that nice boy who did terrible things
died from too much junk,
and that other one who drank
ended up tied to a bed in a clinic, unable to walk,
and that one who let his seedy connections seed him with cynicism
allowed it to steal his belief.
That is it. That is all.

Maybe that's why we invent saviours.
We can think that the ones who don't make it
still make out in some way, even when they don't,
like Jesus could have done it for all of us who won't.

Some people just stop moving,
or they stop lifting their feet when they shuffle forward,
or they live like they're twenty until someone calls them mister
and there are no new places for them to go,
or the drugs eat them through,
or the girls eat them through,
or their families eat them through.
One almost made it, but her mother got old too fast,
and she gave it all away to sit indoors and tend to pills and stool.
The pills preserved nothing,
and I secretly dreamed she would smother the woman with a pillow and be free.

I'm almost forty now,
and we really don't all make it.
People fall into little holes they don't get out of.
I love you,
but we don't all get to recreate genesis as we run.
I don't know why.

There is no word for this:
what it is to look into the face of someone dear,
this person you once loved like a baby,
for we were all both mothers and babies back then,
and to see that this face has had all the quiet fame go out of it.
The future was a secret that winked in their eye once,
and now they're all edges that won't let it in.

They've forgotten,
and we are not so great.

We'll Take This Place Like We Made It

Fuck it.

Do it with your metaphorical cock,
the one you'd swing around if you knew how to find it.
You've got to fuck the thing what needs it.
Ease it onto your meat and take it.
Don't ride it.
It'll ride you just fine.
Stick yourself up inside it.
Make it be a piece of you.
Be at one with the thing.
Hold its hair and fuck it hard up against the headboard,
the dashboard, the back door, the side of your house.
Don't obfuscate the point with pretty words.

No one's interested.

Don't worry about not being pleasant and receptive.
Don't worry about being repulsive.
Throw up your skirt and show the world what you've got under there.
Scare your neighbours and scatter the children.
We've been made too kind, too complacent,
too willing to subvert all our natural menace
and call it an illness,
as though the perversion of extreme domestication is a virtue.
We eat pills when we should be fucking.
We waste the most interesting parts of ourselves
in closets and under beds and in glove compartments and laundry hampers.
We pretend we aren't the wild masters of the human race.
Even our lovers think we're nice,
and it's a goddamned shame.

Come with me.

We'll show our teeth,
and we'll stake it out
where no one's been invited.
We'll swing it around some,
we'll fuck things in the out of doors,
we'll make this place like how we take it,
and we'll take this place like we made it.

It's the way things are now.
We've got to fuck the thing what needs it.

Where I Was From When I Was Seven: Bearing Down Upon The Buoy

I was from a plastic rocking horse with vicious lips and peeling hooves strung up on springs, Hershey's chocolate topping in yellow tins, and baby dolls with nylon hair matted into tough clumps.

I was from the wooden shed tucked beneath a second story deck, its air heavy and cloying, filming my skin over with its sticky humidity and swaying webwork.

I was from the aggression of bright tulips, the planted sweet peas, the crunch of dry spring grass that battered my ears as I rolled down hills.

I was from family dinners and obstinance, from Herta and Cornelia and difficult aunts.

I was from nostalgia and denial.

I was from acceptance withheld and acceptance denied.

I was from the stolid watchfulness of Mennonites and their sudden bursts of laughter out of a secretive mother tongue.

I was from Alberta and the Dnieper, round watermelons with yellow flesh and stewed plums buried beneath thick dough and sweet, heavy cream.

I was from the broken bone of the brother I forgot, the lawn that caught his fall, and the grandmother who believed.

I was from cupboarded photo albums, the worn edges of a rose-handled serving spoon, and childhood drawings filed in the back of a metal cabinet.

I was from these depths of covert love, an impulse at once held close and pushed into corners, a tug-of-war balance struck between a conservative safety and a violent adherence, the weight of salvation bearing down upon the buoy.

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George Ella Lyons' poem called "Where I'm From" inspired Fred First Floyd's form, which I discovered via Sweetney.

If you write your own version of the form, come back and link to it here. I'd love to see what it inspires.