The Anti-Beauty Report
November, 2012
1. The aging complexion
Stay out of sun, stay out of wind: these
times of life blotch your skin and stain your soul
with never-fade remorsefulness. Like lost sex.
Stains amoeba-shaped never drift, flat protozoa
never multiply. The upriver stroke: fish fears, self-loathing,
tormented thoughts of someone else’s death, not mine.
Out of the sun’s scalpel and the wind’s strike
display your fearful hat, stay clear, clearly unstained.
2. Depilation
Try to tweeze away the wrinkles on your upper lip. Fine
and black as threads, but no, they’re crevices. Long ago
I dreamed my age would taste of walnuts, raisins,
fruit with nourishment so deep that all winter one could survive
gnawing dry benefits, as if we lived a different winter
in the desert.
Wrong. One cannot eat old age.
It disgusts the tongue like hairs
which cannot be plucked away or bleached.
3. Mortality
Because the well falls so deep.
Because the tunnel crawls so long and the curved
sky hovers too close, dry clattering like
a hundred helicopters. Why don’t they shoot?
Basically there’s no way out but out.
2010 - 2019
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