Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy

Spiders all in tune

There is a glue that binds us, you know.

The humming of vibrations tie our molecules together

and we shimmy shimmy shimmy through the break of dawn, yeah. 

I think me, I want life.

Yeah me, I want a house and a wife

and the slow disintegration of the days of wine and doses.

You’ve still got a weed tray.

I’m just drinking more coffee

and listening to these bands play.

I wonder if our hands could mold sound like clay.

I haven’t found a way to look sincerity

in the golden fucking fleece

of a face and be the first

to break the gaze.

My thirst for the unflinchingly genuine

suspends judgement and forgives sins

committed in hazy tenements.

My thirst for the tantalizingly tense

derives no pleasure from this

sudden desire for your smile.

You’re not allowed behind

this picket fence.

But me, I want the cackle and grin

that you wear with such permanence.

Me, I want life.

Me, I want to circle round the universe

with an array of tethered satellites

at differing distances for the rare instances

I need the extra signal.

Because, yknow, I might: I keep them all strung tight.

I think me, I want to know what you meant

by what you said last night.

Demise of the Matriarch

Our Shared Past: The Cummer Museum

Do you think she understands now,

her chin protruded permanently

under the weight of her old age,

how our speaking roles decline to walk on parts? 

From center stage to LazyBoy reclined.

Her whole life has passed, her pace made slow,

her cartilage sparse.

I wonder if she knows.

I wonder if she sees the life that glows under my skin,

and mutters under patient breath an ancient prayer of revenge.

She never leaves her chair, the dreads matting her baby fine hair.

Fox News blares.

I can’t shake the smell of piss, I can’t accept

that so many years of careful and modest control come down to this,

I can’t believe that all of life comes down to this.

In another century the bedsheets flowed from her clasped arms.

The promise of the days within her leaked in bright colors,

the direct ray of her charm constantly spilling

into the varied pigments of happiness untold,

saturated and seeping onto collarbones,

the most beauty she would ever hold. 

Her shoulders are not yet stooped, her back has no hump.

The children have not striped her, he hasn’t beat her yet.

For the moment it’s still soda on his breath.

I found the picture, I put it back.

Her skin only knows the white and black of history’s grey concrete,

the colors settled down and faded, the crossroads long deserted.

The cream of newlywed flesh now angular and jaded.

Paper thin and paper white, I put the picture away.

I wonder if she knows.

I wonder if, when her eyes are closed,

she wakes back to her reality; a photograph reanimated,

her bliss refusing to be sedated by time. 

It hasn’t happened yet,

the desiccation of hands into skeletal spots of terror,

it won’t ever happen either.

Listen to the frantic denials

of a woman soaking fact in ether,

setting truth up high on dusty shelves

with all the other trinkets life’s bequeathed her.

The present day is beneath her, and me too,

and we choose to stand before projections of the past

plastered high on museum walls like canvas shrines to shadows

and the lives we cannot stretch to last.

"The Rise of the Matriarch" by Chip Southworth // Our Shared Past: The Cummer Museum

Chimenea

Granules black

like coffee grit

between my outstretched toes.

Pajamas black

and lumberjack plaid

chosen for camping in the cold.

All the bridges broken down and stacked

in the back of a pickup truck,

neatly arranged in wait of that spark,

the spark I can’t not write about,

the spark that fizzles out

and tries again to catch

and grab hold

and set roots.

Around a hearth with laughing faces

that spark outpaces me.