Commencement Address, Stephanie Brown

I read this in the Great American Prose Poem collection and thought I'd share it. Also the collection is pretty good and I'd recommend looking into it.

I have no more to say about throwing up or causing myself to get diarrhea there's nothing heroic about it though the movies on TV want us to endure quietly and cry appropriately. It's a wonderful role for any young actress to place herself in some dead household where the dialogue is sexual between all of them including dead grandparents who are still alive in theory and very much inside everyone's bodies, clucking away like old geezers with huge inflated egos bruised by the failure of their children to spend each moment worshiping their self-created sun. So the girl you see who opens her legs to the idea of fucking everyone who says hello but also wants to feel like a nun with vaginal orgasm rather than the ones his kisses and teeth cause which seem to come to e.g., Saint Therese the Little Flower just from prayer in her cloister for hours which made the girl, the subject of this poem, cry for its truth and its nakedness. Because how could it be good to have that curly-haired boy put his face between your legs nearly every afternoon who will not even say he loves you and this is what your parents don't like about it: he will not spend his money on you or take you places in his car. But of course we have to learn to live inside fences and to sweep and clean lower our heads until in the end it is this which gives me flutters I do not need his teeth and lips at my sacred entrance I find release in order and demure discipline the needle and thread tongue-tied when you accept that you do not have this choice if you become a slut, after you see the error of your ways, you renounce them, you become someone who will live easily within his four walls where he keeps you like the flame of live inside his body there's no need to find the way out this is the way it will be and always was: all the mirrors around you say sacrifice order and love.

Pt 2: Atrocities (a not so lucid reaction to school shootings)

And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
Walt Whitman

I have talked about the old cat and the open throated swallow before, about how all paths lead one way and how it is hard to look away from the intestine spilled across the yard and how hard it is to still welcome the cat home, as he washes the scene away with his pink tongue. He does not think like I do about the bird, whose I know from its persistent calls throughout the day. I think too much of it and feel nothing; I push it from the yard to under the bushes and hope to never see it again. Later the old cat will rub against my leg and I will pet him and he will purr, knead my feet if I let him, and, in time, neither of us will remember.

It might be April still, but it is as cold as February and the wind is unrelenting. I wanted to sit by the creek today, but the wind did sing as I went to the car and I thought better of it. Instead of changing my setting, I set to change myself. I imagine that I am just a set of floating eyes. Without the aid of my glasses, I watch a blur, as though the world is masked by a shroud. How easy a shift can be. It reminds me of locusts; grasshoppers in their swarming phase. When the population becomes to great, the food supply becomes too little, ordinary garden bugs become the thing of plagues. They change from droll greens to pink and yellows. They create a noise that makes this wind outside of my window sound like the mew of a kitten. People say their incisors can draw human blood.

This is the world that we inherit: locusts swarm, cats tear the song from birds. They know nothing else. We do our best to walk on.

Listen: let's make love like praying mantises. I'll bite off your head and suck out your innards and you, decapitated, will fill me with the seeds. In time I'll hollow out a twig and lay down thousands of eggs like the froth on milk. You'll be dead. I will be soon thereafter. In time our larva babies will wriggle out; they will know nothing of us, but the swift acrobatic motion they will use on their prey, whose gaze will be lost in their smooth green faces.

Pt 1.

It is Spring here: I wrestle myself from my cocoon in the mornings to walk barefoot across hard wood floors into the sunlight that litters the room, to the loyal snout of a dog that hunts my long shadow with the single-minded intensity of her nature. I ask nothing more of her and she only wants my hands and food in return.

It is easy to dichotomize and so often we do. We live simply, the dog and I. There are city mice and there are country mice and I suppose that I am the latter. The city mice look down on our types for being naive, for lacking a certain grit that can only be acquired with daily exposure to smog, fresh urine coated buildings, and endless motion. And yet, it is the environment that allows for innocence that becomes so appealing. "What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object." It's not impossible for the other half to achieve. It is the goal. I seek it no matter where I stand: a street corner in Beijing, a mountain in North Caroline, the intersection of K and 21st, the sun room of my house... It is easy here, where I come face to face with a world that created itself; a world thats sphere barely touches my own.

"I loafe and invite myself" just as many have. I seat myself at the edge of a large drop and throw rocks to the bottom where a shallow creek runs. I have never known as I do here. I have never loved as I do now. There is no one in sight, but there is everything around. The rocks hit leaves that have never been touched by the prongs of a rake; they do not make a cracking noise, but rather a soft thump of having hit a pillow. If I tune my eyes correctly, I can see a grasshopper make the same leap from the leaf cushion to the creekside as the rock. He is a gazelle. I am a titan.

"In a field, I am the absence of field... Wherever I am, I am what is missing." I could be more than this. I could, if only I could let the private holiness of this place, where I am an intruder, enter my heart and grow through my body like endless reaching vines. But this would require a leap greater than the grasshoppers, the rock, or even the spring of a cave cricket in the dark of a basement. It would require more love than I have to offer. Love here is the act of whole selflessness, the complete abandonment of the character we cultivate, to create a life, a moment, a feeling, of pure devotion for no other purpose than because it can be. It is the dog chasing a shadow, it is the caterpillar walking across the grass bridges.

So I loafe. I invite myself to someone else's party. I open my mouth an wait for the oak pollen to dye my tongue all shade of green. I imagine if it could grow inside of me, make me take root at this very spot, on this very day. How then, I would no longer be the absence of the field, but the field itself.