The Patient
I am patient. That is my mineral fact. I have long term storage in double helixes my two long polymers of nucleotides my backbone made of sugars and phosphate groups joined by ester bonds. I see imagist pears dissolving down golden arms I hear needle-less the sleep aid cd's real violins, then float blue-black at the eventide, injure of the taut to and fro, cut-back asphalt road, a path of greening twigs nourishing nothing personal. Root stocks of the best grapes, balm for the honeybee's bite, lyme's flea— money chimes in the community bowl, with patience I can sit on this bench and wait for the ironworks of a previous century to reverse themselves, or I can lie in the grass, vision the airplane's scatter-lit hallway, the descent only a little shaky like the trouble between art and life rolling you out into an unpainted landscape, the unbelted intoxication of travel unstable as a chemical's twisted briar medicine or drug licit or illicit or afterimage time to move along it's pathos time dodge a supreme fear pathos— Patience was crowding anxiety Patience's tired tongue was breaking a bone, while the twin and drone to be patient with hovered over our uncharted, rimless wants, rictus a slit vowel— La vida, a mess of dominoes face down. I am a pilot light desiring more recognition, I suck grass to the dead inside. The sleep aid cd & Hippocratic oath mixed up good in the cocktail of my head spoken into like commerce's cavity, cavity or skylight opening to the early spring blossoms in the airless baggage claim SANCHEZ in stencil font stitched to my desert fatigues holding luggage looking for someone to pick me up I can be both life-charged and dead in consecutive units, exited to like turnpike rest stop's promisingly lit pagoda, a respite for the humans stopping and returning, the humans predicating, a human is someone who has wandered in from the desert. I am patience in a substance clothed. truly a creepy troll truly a creepy troll a human is the one continuing to close Christ's eyes on the great crucifixes wagering will there now be some inevitable progress. In a tone pour, the erotics of the electronics swelling the house and trailing to the sidewalk, skip to sound a harrowing to go, a darned patch A soft fontanel a warm harm a human does nothing unusual, forgetting the euphoria of human potential is human potential wanting more tools to form the mind. Rest, stop, a human is go stopping and returning, a practice a human is someone to pick you up a human is someone to hone in a human's long-held desire to vanish in a crowd or x-ed out void of others, in mass human's estranging light.
Copyright © 2011 by Gillian Conoley. Used with permission by the author.