The Human and Vegetable Experience

You can’t have it all
But when I grow up
I’m going to name my kid Heaven
Because I’ll need a little heaven
When all I face is hell

You can’t have it all
But I’ll paint murals and banisters blue
So it’ll make sense that I’m sad when I look at you

Yes I know I can’t have it all
Love:
sweet and real and innocent

I’ll have to look twice at the colours
Of a million lovers who won’t remember my name

But you see I try just like my mother
I dye my eyes in water colours
I coddle my dreams until they’re smothered
I’m canon fodder for the new age lovers

I put on rosemary glasses to cure perception
Of the candid lies and inconceivable deception

That’s life, making a getaway
With my childhood…
That’s life taking me up like a fire on the lips like someone worthwhile to kiss

But even I must die, memento mori
You can’t have it all
Death whispers into the ears of a liar
To the ears of life

-v.

Darling you are a sacrifice to the universe
Your life is a sacrifice
Like the birth of a star
The cancer streamed through your body
First there was nothing
Then God said let there be light
And you fell that one morning
And the day was black a void of nothingness
A black hole of treatments and regiments
Then God said let us make man in our own image
And you cried when you started losing your hair
The nappy curls replaced with a smooth surface
And you gained and lost weight
I remember holding you big and small
And He said it is very good
I remember how cold you were in my arms
You belonged to the universe and I willed it for more time but you are the sacrifice so you are not mine
You can’t have it all
There were times when I believed I could
Then like Eden you were lost to me
And now I wait for the end
And you die

-v.

The shape of your love
Is the moon
But my mind is cynical
And the moon is harsh
Against my frail body
I hope to be bolder
I needed music
you gift music to people who are in trouble?
You see I have this mantra
It’s an act of reincarnation
Bad luck good luck
Just as meaningful to me as the sound of war
You gift music to people who are in trouble
I often think of this during bedtime
As I lay under the covers
To fight off the reality that
No one believes in love anymore
Gone is the golden age of the New Romantics
And when the Lord returns will He find any left

-v.

I picture myself flying
Out of the intricate womb of the universe
Face to face with God
Face to face with the Solar System

They look and feel the same
Endless and titanic
I’m just a freckle on God’s face

Then there’s Earth mother of all things living
The flowing waters are crystal shards of liquid
But then there’s you
The face of God and Solar System I can hold in my hands
I ate the forbidden fruit from your fingers
Soft like the wings of angels

Maybe you’re not supposed to eat the wings of angels
Maybe you’re not meant to savour the taste of seeing like God
But I did. It felt like the galaxy again
Endless space the clearest focus
I saw my atoms before I saw my skin then my naked body
And the realisation of seeing my body felt like spring everything was open and new functioning and blossoming
The last time I saw the face of God was
After we’d been kicked out of Eden
The next time was when you gave birth
I saw what it meant to be created
I felt again like a freckle on the upturned face of God

-v.

You my love are a garden
And I forbid the rustic foot of a man
To crush you
I lay stretched out on top of you
Collapsed in sunbeams
White picket fence
Blue summer dress
The endless love makers
Laureled by the praise of silence
As you look deeply into my eyes
Searching for the brilliance of the soul
Your hand in mine our breathing in sync
But this is not all there is to a marriage
Marriage is complex and frightening
Revelatory and restrained
You will have to show restraint that is
By human standards impossible
But we derive meaning from nothing
And nothing from meaning
Nothing is sacred only if you care
The duties are laid out before you
Like Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper
All is sacred and yet ostentatious
The virago burnt on the stake

-v.