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Marge and Grace (continued) (written in 1989 by Stefanie Rocknak) © 1999 Stefanie Rocknak Part III: What would you be if you were to be this But a shallow stage Lisping broken sentences lost lines or worse, Poorly rehearsed Flat repetitions of pedantic soliloquies Stuck on a tongue too big to hide But too small to flap with at least The boldness of entertainment So what would you be if you were to be This Marge She asked the short haired short girl In the mirror Hung in the McDonalds ladies room In between hitting The hand dryer with precision Wound inside and around her right hand Now it's out of the Chair With these small steps I can At last ask in A Giant leap to have And to hold with this beat She hit again Prompted by a stretched ten year-old Dragging a purse and a ponytail calling for The manager was on his way with This beat and in This kingdom God save it's red and Yellow of over an eternity sold Each year for With this I thee wed To have she left and pushed Through the manager And to hold holding The brown uniformed Sleeve for a second And to hold she repeated Staring and raised the bored From the dead with a simple Glance of Grace, And left. *** Foundations found on fathers' feet and mothers' sweat Makes Makes little but cost for Waking under crumbling arches Vaguely triumphal in their chrome-bannered conception Pulling parades pock-marked with laughter *** Come my children and you will hear A story of red, yellow, And sidewalk fear Falling from brows Beat in rage Of pigs feet pressed in a wax-papered age. Come my children and you will hear A story of split, shallow And callous ears Strung under hair Hiding tattoos Crawling with care but twisted and blue. Purple ink stains pigs pasted Opaque on slaughter hooks so We are ready for market, Follow me look The piper pied, And strung too as you so Follow me to the lights lightening Roll up your sleeves and Powder the grease from Your elbows to your necks, But let your faces shine To reflect the beat In my voice in my Grace took another Hit The beat in my my What a horrible state She sighed and pulled The hair back from her face Sewn in sweat What a mess I'm in. *** But I She smiled but I And nodded to the suits and heels Passing and put out her cigarette Before turning her chair to better Hear the band playing down the street Behind black wheezing boxes Rocking and rocking to roll. *** Give me strength Because I need it To forgive What might have been What should be And now Give me strength Grace prayed to the picture Of pigeon-striped perfection Hardened in a present's steel dress Holding before between and Below her the hollow celebration of a torch Oblivious inside a crown Lift see and lend me She said on nascent knees Strength to forgive Me now for the trespasses I keep Now tattooed to have And forever to Hold-- Over an eternity Sold— *** Lose it Leave it alone But I've got To take it With me leave it Grace you can't have It forever It finds its way It's not an it But an as A becoming A leaving and a going Where when nothing Happens but hoping And what should be forgotten are Idealizations Idealizations, Grace Ghouls, ghosts of hoping That's your future Found in the mirror Standing here talking to Yourself a reflection Of orange Sounding of blue Frying fluorescent and Still reeking Of rot. *** The brow beat of a heart-tick locked in a Moment's wasted momentum Waits for a piece of a piece That would seem to blend with the others Dropping off Now drifting. Part IV: As seen in circles, Well trod and pissed on The traveler, before going into depth and discomfort, Will up and leave With practiced hesitation to the next It was with this notion The choleric motion of flight Was first deftly tuned Into running grants us robed justification to Attenuate guilty strings of responsibility played in Insipid friendships-- Excused as impatience rather than Callousness or immorality. Than the latter im to be outlined in Perpetuated in our nothingness Back to what we were before this stumbling painfulness Of trying to be kind of permanent. But coeval truth promises unbodily immortality Offering the drugs of apotheosis Ready to be taken after the acute pressure of Well-placed, self-inflicted and certainly unpardonable for pity, heat. *** And it's at that point you understood The limitations of self aggrandizement that Make salient the systems of solution Because that's how you visualized, Even felt the process. You were content with watching, And waiting for the whole ordeal to settle For at least a short while so You could re-assess the act of shaking and Maybe what you saw reflected Outside the beaker as it refracted Made you wonder Would you be able to get out? *** Affordable ice for giving Meticulously scraped from years of resentment Cools Graces's wake of momentum, Paper sacrifice, and pompous self-election *** Attempts to bear company Bridle now And again reliving Repetitive frauds, Rebuilt temples of the embryo Leading bleeding stumbling and Plastered video-misfits— Great hoping maladroits Too often tempting the idiosyncratic to lay down Their locked kingdoms of arms. *** With impotency building a state of unadulterated Equality that instinctively motions for mediocrity We are certain to find what is conceived of as Grace. *** Memory does not place us In some sort of poetic picture of permanence In that fashionable void called despair Where Judgement falls Displacement aches And time continues Not neglecting nor caring And above all not despairing And not only is because is presents Resentment past Music in motion where recognition begins Built by a self-described determinate Fluttering bars of Let time own you, History be your You can't deny their Blood is drying In acceptance of Desperation and your desperation Alone mixed with will. Time is not worshipped Not good Not malevolent Not benevolent But acceptance Posits freedom exiting despair by being despair. *** Or while the tar thickened on southern roads The birds beat their washed-out wings With just an angle more clarity speed and dexterity. And with this in mind you set off to another cloudless Though often with rain pregnant place that's Hardly home nor hardly adventure, But spites boredom. And you had a book. You had a book so you filtered through the pages Sticking with confusion Melodrama and unfortunately as always-- Contempt-- To see what had brought you there, And maybe what would bring you back; Hoping for not only a new vocabulary, But also a subtraction of a previously unwilled and tangled discourse. This is what you did, unskilled laborer that you were-- And in many ways, should hope to always be. For you'll learn later That sweat's the natural opiate Passing pain with no resonance Of barely a memory at all. And so, like Rhinos streaming and Heaving mud in a storm they left You left Everybody left While leaving happens as, of course, a skill. Though if one isn't good enough, or perhaps too, Leaving maintains its grace and becomes A contradiction of what once has been What is to be Or the highly sought after what is. Quietly put: A matter of temperament. Part V: A Broken Mirror Where did you find the division? There was no division-- It was all part of the hope, Your crystal structure of desire. Smoking The structure itself begging a persistence of wind or the Crafty little minds that we are And how long should this last? Oh, for just about as long as you do I suppose. This language Is your language. I know. The language of grace. You speak in illusions then. I do, but with such passion wouldn't you agree? *** Too much pressure? Too much Too much pressure Grace. Making you want to puke? To puke To puke You make me feel But Marge you can feel, Excruciatingly alive Alive Grace? You've set up shop in my head In a state of irrefutable rot and disgrace Not to mention your unrelenting responsibility To make the most of giving direction to motion That's a lie Marge A lie? A lie? Are you out of my head? Laughter Throw me out. Go away. I falter for faith found in contradictions. *** What, Marge said, You tempted me to undertake A symphony slipping from the torpor Still through to the disrespect of misconception Nor much attempt Twisted rusted trust meretricious forgotten faith Liken to abandonment Leaving the churches a consistent crumbling Of tradition I 'm so Small No sorts of solutions no sorts of because because I could still talk A sweating calm settling in for the evening Sleep finds me there A luxury offering a crutch I don't think I can rock with the change Stop grinning We call this going *** Would it be a tremendous loss if I said Grace said, I was sorry Or would it be another collapsed apology? Sorry for this: Grace displayed absence Beneath a well-kept sheet on a better kept stage. *** It's because I can't face my shadow swallowed by Attempt inevitably followed in failure But not failure of accomplishment Rather failure of pursuit That has to be fleeting To sew at least any meaning Where division pulls us in Disregarding geometry of reason, Ordering with a resounding thunder of After. Not to be found here I wanted and when I seemed to be Getting close to getting Marge said to the crowd of poorly imposed ghosts, I froze. But I need you still I still want to need you don't forget The mirror With this ring In game fields I thee wed To have and to hold To be bought raped and sold Subtly being the winner In days deceived of yellow and tepid hunting Till death do us part I've parted But hardly I'm cold On phantom legs pulling Fractured construction Simply because I can't face the responsibility of Displacing a voice I never quite had. Part VI: So extraordinarily much to wander through So incredibly edibly much And when it hits it holds Fast to my face flattened The thing about bastardization Sing a stripe Strength How could I have thought anything Would have changed? Together again with cancerous mutations; Unprepared and most likely incapable of growing For anything but growth. Watch them wait slack-jawed for direction Tempting radio boredom And the tension of an un-touchable Fame vomited on cardboard boxes of Recycled musical-pharmacies Broken of the love of the beaten child Innocent of the way dropping Daily discomfort cherish those bloodied and bruised be Liberal and wise Turn around And cover ourselves in selectable delectable words Verbatim *** Describing a walk through our great Impotence lacking reaction to roll Cotton-mouthed suggestions to The cheering Crowd built mammoth granite edifices Chipping blasts from north of wherever Callousness is bred and sliced Hid in selected crevices holding huddled arms and Fingers pressed white to dark On the green behind the gravel The rotting has stopped Unselfish love to hate is it? Faith a gasping dare today Unreachable unapproachable Unaffordable unaccountable and Laughed at ha ha You fool of contempt *** A baby bounces on the neon horizon Breaking the day for conception. Night-time wanders. Go this room the number one requested Song of the century So temporarily the throw-away description Of reason. Reason changes Is defined Was exploded to Re-create a morality of Reason once reasonable. *** There's a certain hollow quality to this place Where blushed-blue whales swim in sand Stirring a painting Slightly lifted From the fat cacophony of re-creation; Laughing on the warm days. *** Commitment whispering a slant off the azure Pulls across a clear day of looking up, Where sand falls in a box painted white--tintless, But thick with the reflection of playing Cross-legged with mutable expressions of delight. *** Reflect on green stripes shaking salted Epiphanies Reflect on darkened dining rooms For overpowering persuasion. Who? Quixotic poets sing: "It's a song, a song" Mindful mastication of broken lines lightened and Purged through leech filled deltas. A song Sorry for no hunting, Weary of playing a Fool by a mirror. Like a mosquito, A body in soft orange resin Stands in a warm room waiting with Palms out for Dust filled, fly thickened and Slow, Self-respect. You'll find me there after Behind dark green windows swept with the Reddening of rooms breathing For clarity conscience and Pride in The submission to stillness.