Think the Story in Order, Elizabeth Bolick [the reading list book .txt] 📗

Think the Story in Order

I. To Grow Calloused
II. To the Justification of Nature
III. I Go Back
IV. To PS183
V. A Five Year Old Birthday
VI. As a Character Invented.


To Grow Calloused

Growing a moral framework
If not by law
To sustain
Something once beautiful

To fetch a death
Slumbersomely
As an intoxicant
Cut out lonesome
An explication of singularity
Nothing fraudulent in this
Though subjects will refuse
Under inclusive headings
Demonstrating deviations
Statistics of thought
Nothing to save

Stone of change
Here is my sign
Ready to bellow bad breath
With love
Too afraid
When thinking
Think
The story
In order
To absolute death

Build it up
Filling mouth
With earth
With a new demand
The body is of one
It is oblivion
I am the answer

Growing calloused
With low pleasure
In its true character
On morality
Of such
An act
Acting out this
Option is naught
And what is want

I stand under my window
As the only one
Basking
From past fueled
Vibrations
Gaining strength
In something
Here.



To the Justification of Nature

Watching a fly struggle
To die
Beneath the white curtain
Cradled in dirt encrusted
Windowsill twitching
Nervously
With purpose
To catch
Death itself.

In the flesh
At the same time
With the most ancient friend of wisdom
Standing truth on her head
Keeping us from cleaning ourselves
For rarely confiding in those that are better
To gain the courage to rechristen
The eternal hostile tension.

For he must conceive of woman
Lose the sense of ground
To be undangerous
Always requiring a cure.

A philosopher
Always returns to himself.

He hears the sophisticated
Concept of friendship
And often is afraid
Yet alleges shamelessly
To the justification of nature.

At times he would pretend
Far from finding himself transported
He finds all eyes to disappear
To an efficient condition.

Then no one understands
The look of a man who has suddenly
Remembered something and reflecting
On this situation,
He is the lines.

Writhing in the fallacy
Of descended inconsistencies
Of martyrs directed
From alienation
The fine things was what determined speech
The inked fingertips; His brain.

To crawl
To hang back
Managing it frivolously
At the turn
To love
Their reunion so long averted—

He would have liked to invent
With no vulgar reminder and
That the thing of will
Appears natural.

He is the present
Something to be suffered
As if carved to creation
by a sewing needle
ravaged to its fullness.

He was to live as full for it
To believe in this

He has declared it
Without an ending
Saying: “I must work the words
To love no false oath.”

Afflicted and ready
To die like every one
Grass in the field
He is committed.
To nothing.


I Go Back

I go back to the murderer
Who says he is a monster
After no one will believe


To PS183

Cold artificial lighting imitating warmth,
Dim lights peering out classroom windows
Three child sized basketball hoops
Yellow and blue monkey bars, that red twisting slide.
You enter through one gate to find the second then third
Casting shadows of thin iron bars
Projected on the side of yet another brick building
Two trees-lone-scraggly- on opposite ends
Each rooted in concrete encased
In remnants of the last snowfall
I watch them play
Five and seven.


A Five Year Old Birthday

Old chap gun holster on a Sunday
Mountains beyond chrysanthemums
Plums and blood oranges

Footprints in drying concrete sticking residue
Of pink lemonade and cake frosting of a birthday
Five year old birthday
Without mother cause it was that birthday the first
The no mother birthday
And a day to be barefoot on that Brooklyn street
Idling just outside the gate
Father watching from the window

Black and white checkered dress and a cat matching
Mother matching curls little Girl laughing
Pictures in a photo album
Memories created through photo album captions
And acetate renderings dates
Reminders to remember

Changing to change clothes cleaning everything away
In trash heaps piles to be sent
To goodwill bins in back corners
Of grocery store parking lots used
Cds and boots the laundry basket is full
The old pair of sneakers worn
For four years of high school angst
Smell they stink really
Reminders to remember.

Fifteen years later
The concrete footprints remain
Iconic on that Brooklyn Street
Hidden under the garbage cans
Of new Owners and Memories
Reminders to Remember.


As a Character Invented

From the dissecting hands of a scientist
I am everywhere
I suffer
I move
As an apparition
Illuminating the plain and common
To the news of time.

Oh, unfortunate traveler
As a character invented
You don’t operate often
Through the medium
In which men move

But the saga as it has come
Flourished in the reigns
An echo in his non literal speech
From fictive reasoning—
We are separate from the world.

Almost faithful
My heaving breathing efforts criticized
To nothing serviceable
Obstinate and pliable
When I first dared to say farewell
To the dirt and that tree
No line will break
Of these uncommon things
To God without thunder.

I know no one loves
So be humble like the dust
You’ll crawl to the edge
And only through me
You will die over
And over.

I was born flesh and ghost
I am now neither
Your general is here.
Here I am.

Publication Date: 08-15-2010

All Rights Reserved