May 23, 2016

TO THE FLEDGLINGS

Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Fresca, 2016; digital image

Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Fresca, 2016; digital image

I could clean this shovel

or nap in its possible use

I could mend the clasp and the seam

I could make lace, iron, and houses

I could plead for more work

& merge onto the pedestrian highway, working a fast-acting sud into the pallet of exhaustion while pigs on high horseback pen and prod

or I could demand the leisure to make love and laugh

as the honeydew and the grapefruit, wisteria brine and datura liquor, as this relentless mortal earth

I could wash the grass

I could raise the mainsail and frame the wind

I could count on bosses to promulgate the mandate that life on earth is for suffering

I could defend like a philosophical drone the legalistic ease of uninterrupted aesthetic progress

or I could bounce a brick ball off the face of what keeps us from just sustenance

& reach a gloved hand through tempered shards to get at the bounty

I could evict the germ and the bran

I could pay off the last of what it took to confirm the lump is mobile but not for now malicious

I could extract my milk teeth

or develop a diet of only snails and champagne

 

I won’t flatter commerce and its confidants

I won’t seal the hatches and make a steambath of the precinct

I’ll build a coat of sweat from fucking and foraging, for the sensation of their twinning

I want to rest in the self-same place where my fellows strike a bunt against the night

 

I could cultivate a work-centered identity

I could ban blood, cake, air, ooze, ease, loaves

I could sleep in this spittoon or call a bodice a blanket

or lazily graze on the horizon wherefrom a perpendicular love will knock the bow of my self-sustained boat

the way borders burst open under their propensity for feasting

I could be a revitalized basin, I could be steel upturning the earth

I could be ashamed of bedding the inedible fruits of flowering plants, or for occupying a dwelling in which there is a bed or a window or a having at all

or I could be a water rat self-scratching my flank gland and lining the palace walls with sweetest fecal syrup

 

I want to be in the lazing camp surrounded by unirrigated wilding

aligned with alliterative pattern and inordinate demand

confounding the anthropologist and the academic

So while I could be an accomplice to the flood

or insist on property as my right to white life

or saunter out into the surf of the street with the gaze and the beard and the bread and the get called genius and heir

better to ladle in the brothy endurance of subsistence and resistance

If I mimic the pit’s angle of repose and catch the downward flow in my yawning yawp

will I exceed containment

will I be a scandal to productive logic

or a pencil palm waving in grayest coming storm

 

I could pile the pantry onto the third rail and braise all day by power of perspiration

I could truck with the teat of national interest and competitive eating

I could call the sap-extracting club my unwavering god

or I could be a gainfully unemployed brow on a grassy pillow

orienting giving to the generous pyracantha of bright red globes

I could slurp this soursoup

I could enumerate lessons learned and forks swerved from

I could be restraint, perfected hailing, efficient breeding


but the breadth I want is napping, phototactic

bathing in the drowsy milk of dewing over doing

happened upon like the push-up cacti me and my love saw sprung at the lake

Nature never made no merchant

Sabotage is sister to system, that’s what eating is, that selfsame momentum

Give me bumpers of burgundy and the purring whir of jasmine

I want to negate productivity on my back, in this clover

softest heels never near pounding the atriums of tribute

As bread is 90% air, may breathing be largely bread, and so too endeavoring, forever sated

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