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A tiger ashamed of its stripes
Jun. 1st, 2006 08:37 amI didn't start loving you, until you left me, and there is just one piece about you, a song from 2002, about a tiger ashamed of its stripes, that will ever make water flow over my brims. The rest has been written already by Pablo Neruda and others, not about your specific armpits and lips, fjords and fjelds, but close enough for static heat to arise.
You make me always look for the golden middle road and cover my stripes, in places where I should flaunt and brag and choose a path, damn your humble pioneers, damn my love for them.
While we start a timid line and politely wait our turn, lovers fall out of love and positions get filled, siblings become mothers and children grow stripes, but you have taught me to not make a French rumble of it all. We wait.
I will not blame your slender bureaucratic hands for showing love in a measured cup of efficiency and clean towels for all people, I know that my fear is my own stew, and even your nose gets a wrinkle from its smell.
But I want to shake you and then keep you completely still for the whole night.
I will watch you, child, mother sibling, changing accent in your sleep-talk, into a slow north american rolling of vowels, the pattern on your back adopting what you mock.
I will try to catch that last flutter of an eyelash before you wake, and put it behind glass and frame.
In order to not so clearly be the coward who is only able to speak the truth in poetry,
I cut the line and cut its throat, unmaking this poem.
photo from the Kent album "Vapen & Ammunition"
You make me always look for the golden middle road and cover my stripes, in places where I should flaunt and brag and choose a path, damn your humble pioneers, damn my love for them.
While we start a timid line and politely wait our turn, lovers fall out of love and positions get filled, siblings become mothers and children grow stripes, but you have taught me to not make a French rumble of it all. We wait.
I will not blame your slender bureaucratic hands for showing love in a measured cup of efficiency and clean towels for all people, I know that my fear is my own stew, and even your nose gets a wrinkle from its smell.
But I want to shake you and then keep you completely still for the whole night.
I will watch you, child, mother sibling, changing accent in your sleep-talk, into a slow north american rolling of vowels, the pattern on your back adopting what you mock.
I will try to catch that last flutter of an eyelash before you wake, and put it behind glass and frame.
In order to not so clearly be the coward who is only able to speak the truth in poetry,
I cut the line and cut its throat, unmaking this poem.
photo from the Kent album "Vapen & Ammunition"
