Conversation

"No one else loves you."
"...Like you do?"
"No, period. No one else is capable of loving you but me."

Hable A Ella

You left "i left someone" for me to read,
and I wrote my rights to you to reply:

1. To "take it right" in my Lionmane pride
__when I synthesize your diction into mine.

2. To speak to you and write to you in
__heiroglyphics and onomatopoeias and colors.

3. To presume nothing when you expose
__yourself to me; both eyes closedIpromise.

4. To shake our words around in conversations
__and call it dancing while lying on the floor.

5. To deceive your reluctance for praise by praying
__words into observations: "Complex. Like you."

6. To love your petnames because "rickrickarack hey child"
__has more slapyourhead honesty than my birthname.

7. To take touch slow, sighing your alrights with every
__advance of my deerly fingertips picking lint.

8. To offer you the patience and calm it seems neither your
__daily interactions nor your own brain have in stock.

9. To stay silent, mosey silent, when in my head I hear
__yelps and yips and yawps of "ILOVEYOUILOVEYOU!"

10. To challenge your originalities and eccentricities, make
__them more your own, and to make you think. Think.

11. To paint your toenails and kiss your forehead the
__next time you say you don't need closeness.

Strawberry Knees

Evelyn didn't mind being a girl. She knew what it meant to be a girl of her age; wear pink and frilly everything. Love unicorns and poke boys with sticks. Enjoy candy, cartoons, and sleepovers with other girls.
She was unaware--at the gentle, pigtailed age of nine--of all the obligatory accoutrement that she would eventually grow into. At this age, she was not yet familiar with what "patriarchy" means, who Anais Nin was, and what expectations society had in store for her teen-aged and adult selves. Pencil skirts. Spider eyes. Celine Dion. An explicitly specified sense of sexuality.
But these qualities of womanhood were so surface and she questioned much more often the elemental differences between boys and girls. Cosmetic surgery and drag can make anyone anything, so she knew that physical appearance wasn't it. Give a man some duct tape and a woman some duct tape and they can switch roles.
Instead, she thought, while riding her bicycle, if only girls liked riding their bicycles. If only girls sometimes trip up, get a shoelace caught in the cogs, or glance away when eyes should be bullets forward, and scrape and chafe their skin against pavements, dirts, and cool spring grasses. If only girls beat their chests and yawped in pain and pride for their strawberry knees and busted anklets.

[Maybe I could be an Eventually]

Maybe I could be an Eventually
and live up to all of my procrastinations
so that I'm reliable in some respect.

Maybe I'm a not-know,
trying on for size your yesyesyeses or nos and
finding assurance and safety unassuring and unsafe (unsafely).

If any is a euphemism for choice,
count me in as anyone, anywhere, anyhow,
surviving out of and off of anything I can d.i.y.

And if I can live on and propose any anys,
they'd be a handful of unsures, a pride of
idon'knows, a tattle of hmmms.

Camus imbued absurdity in the life of a
million Strangers sold, and I couldn't count
on a more satisfying quietude of apathy.

Now I create divisiondistortion, within the harmony
we float through. So while you're looking at your
watch, I'm trying to avoid planning my next move.

___________________________________________________________________________________
*Because Justine's right, these notes are only for the truly oblivious. But I can't delete them after having experienced the thrill of notes from the likes of T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," or most nearly everything from David Foster Wallace.*

* An abbreviation for the contemporary anarchistic creed of "Do it Yourself," the belief that we should live our lives relying solely on ourselves for most of life's predicaments in order to make us more responsible and stronger in character, mind, and body.
**Albert Camus (pronounced Ahl-bear Cam-oo) wrote The Stranger during the Existentialist movement, and it has since been considered one of the crowning achievements in narratively explicating many of the philosophies of Existentialists: the absurdity of life, individuality, non-conformity, hedonism, exploring the significance of tangibles, etc. The protagonist is defined by his apathy towards social norms, living for himself in passive means and ignoring the consequences of his actions.
***Modest Mouse is a terrific band whose single "Float on," is primarily about not getting too heated over lukewarm predicaments in life, but here I enrich the phrasing by emphasizing the passivity (in life and in its multitude of moments of decision) inherant therein.