Discussion in workshop on Tuesday on how to write about thephysicallities of love lead to me giving myself a challenge. This is the result. (Insert Law and Order sound here)
Don’t fall away waves the ones that make sense by declaring the right thing to do. No one wants to hear voices of what will never work. That this is a dream. A failure. A bad calling.
Waking up to tires flailing is never what the tire dealer’s daughter wants to hear.
There is no lull in a collar here. No predicted, consistent temperament. Only wavering certainty and misunderstood consonants.
When you were used to Picasso, Rembrandt and fumes
Of paints and clay, worn and dried, fresh and cut
With nothing but humbled pride.
We made eggs in your eye stirring them till
Complete and filling to our mouths that wrapped around the
Words we learned to spout to each other.
To spend our last morning with you.
This is our forever, this is our hello
And it was our goodbye.
-J. McIntyre
Then, I transformed it into Italian sonnet form:
Fine Arts Building
We spent a semester inside your walls
When you were used to Picasso and Hume
and cut with nothing but humbled fumes.
Watching them crumble as you heard our calls
Of Emerson, Ginsberg, Neruda and Walls
Of paints and clay, worn and dried perfume. We
made eggs in your eye stirring them, gooey.
They bloomed, complete and filling to our mouths
which called around the words we learned to spout
wildly. This is our forever, this is
our hello and it was our goodbye.
To spend our last morning with other doubt,
while learning to live here without dismiss.
We will go forward, breathe and standby.
-J. McIntyre
Watching and making this evolution was not easy, nor exactly fun at certain times. But, poetry, I love ya. This is a good dance we have going. I let you lead this time.
Useless moon, Too beautiful to waste. But you, my Cinderella, have the midnight curfew, a son waiting to be picked up from his den meeting, and the fractured marriage weighing on your head like a crown of thorns.
Oh my beauty, it’s not polite to keep me waiting. To send me reeling in a spiral and then to say good night.
I smoke a cigar, play a tango, gulp my gin and tonic.
Goddamn you.
Full moon and you’re not here. I take off the silk slip, the silver bangels.
You’re in love with my mind.
But, sometimes, sweetheart, a woman needs a man who loves her ass
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