Steve Benson, Three pages from IT

page twenty-eight from Steve Benson’s handwritten text

Three pages from IT

(page twenty-eight)

I was thinking about how we don’t expect

To see grass or a flower grow or open

With our bare eyes in broad daylight

I may not get enough of whatever it is I need

To sort out my abilities and hopes

I want to meet you with open arms and an embrace

I come with books, DVDs, and clothes enough for

Half a year of getting used to me while watching

Metamorphosis or stasis, unsure of which

Plays its hand most decisively

My deepening absorption erupts in enthusiastic

Breakthroughs instead of perseverant quibbling

When I lock myself up with the freedom to think

You look yourself up and down reflecting

The mirror’s image into an interpretation

Decay repetition entropy imitation work

Things may be falling apart but we people

Seem more often to fall open like pages

Of an intently read book one can get lost

In. And we by nature put things together

Even more than we destroy their linkages

If we fall apart ourselves maybe that’s even

More in our nature than we can realize, since

We’re so relentlessly perseverant in making sense

Of each fly in the ointment, each reflection

In a puddle of tears. What else do you see

           On the other side of your fall of hair?

Your eyes are barely visible yet so enthralling

I lose my balance just trying to make them out

         The glistening brown red streaks

The pale deep pink of flesh beneath

             The rich mud red         The vibrant darkest

Browns               Men and women dancing laughing

The surprises successfully

       Like I heard myself say, I remember

    Birds clustering along a wire

I notice and think of different things

             The difference between triumph

And catastrophe is how you feel it

     Arrogance, sarcasm, and humility

page twenty-nine from Steve Benson’s handwritten text

(page twenty-nine)

Never too soon or too late to forget
But people explain anyway, to rescue
Themselves as if from perturbations
Of conscience by protectively conscientious
Cognitions that enjoin mud to become sediment
Flowers to become fruit. The person
Who’s at the cash register in the restaurant
Recognizes me but I can’t tell where I’ve ever
Saw them before or what their name is
Embarrassed to believe I call that way she looks
At me and my dumb gawk while I talk smart
And fumble with the loose edges of my own
Clothing before I remember to check my pocket
For the wallet I must have left home on the dresser
Or in the bus squirming when I pulled out my
Cell. She smiles looking me right in the eye as
If to say, “I see you and that’s all
You need to know,” paralyzing my volition
To attend to anything anyone else
Has to say. I have to stay. I leave. I come back
To find you here. Where have you been all my
Whole life? The orange is in the refrigerator
Everything else is suspended in constant change
A sort of revolution. This is oral poetry
The renovators tore off the windows I would have
Sung to you below. The harsh rain lances
The paper left behind in lieu of panes
You still look, your presence still feels
Different than others to me. Maybe they all feel
There is nothing to feel, nothing to do, there is nothing
To be done to. The pigeonholers convey their
Stereotypes telegraphically. The planet doesn’t budge
But something slides itself across it
So that everything seems to move confusingly
Close to one another, almost losing themselves
In one another’s paths and thought. Tonight
I am as isolated as anyone joined at the hip
To someone so impossible to live with, so
Implausible to conceive, so enigmatically
Narcissistic a cipher I might as well go
Jump in a lake as rot in hell, but I don’t

page thirty from Steve Benson’s handwritten text

(page thirty)

The film begins to cloud as the boat unmoors

Into an inverted cove that shelters uncertainty

As a fantasy hinges on one’s history, throwing

One’s abandon to the winds and one’s body into

Chaos or at least disarray, once one merges

Fantasy to object into body and comes along

To ride the wild roan into the would-be nightmare

That is passionate delight roasting soul over

Flaming boards and embers of pathos, lost hope

Galloping across dehydrated plates of desiring

Flesh that knows for the moment nothing else

But dryness, desiccation, splitting fragments

I morph, with remorse wishing me into unity

Or else a self-rejection, committed to not knowing

An identity, purpose, or place in the world

A tray slides out with a tree on it, an ash

Tested by a breeze or breath breaks into dust

A thing is hardly solid but it’s sold as if it were

Of equivalent value to another. Each of us has but one

Life to try to live, through which to notice or to know

What life is, not only in us but as life realizes

Itself through myriad relations and contacts

With lives, whether or not other or not, sane

Or insane, the heart, the sole, fever, bliss

Such intensity is hard to bare without fainting

At my age, nearly two-thirds of some century

Old if that’s the word. Getting to know myself

Better, I forget who or what I am. A luscious

Not knowing, warm when it isn’t hot, seeps

Through me body soul and mind so I quietly seethe

Particles as waves, the depth of presence, and

How inevitable the ineffable resolution of all

Momentary perturbations into the crystallization

Of decease, a relative termination, while the rest

Of us, which is to say we, as species, viral

Unto our environment, besieging reality by force

As if by magic we could wheedle our way into each

Cell in the universe and corrupt it to our multi-

Farious misbegotten mutually deflecting destinies

I pause at the portal of a seeming futurity
To gasp for breath, a pleasure as it comes

                                                            (09 01 – 10 19 2015)

—Steve Benson