2/8/2017 0 Comments Three Poems by Devon BalwitThe Triumph of Mediocrity Sometimes, half-assed is the best you can do, the pot half-cleaned, the fence propped, the buckling floor pressed flat with books. You learn to dial down want. You go to work, but your mind toggles elsewhere. You stare through your cubicle at an invisible horizon, the answers you give do not bear scrutiny. Back home, you and your one-time-love share a domicile the way strangers do an elevator, each taking a quadrant, careful not to crowd. Even your insomnia falls short, the same fears recycled until, like a much-read letter, they split at the seams, leaving you casting about for a reason to wander. You give thanks for tepidity, knowing the great draw the scythe. Better to go camouflaged like a bird dropping, able to rise once the raptors have flown. Palimpsest “Life is made of…thousands of fragments. These…are connected with the passage of time…They coexist.” (Ivan Albright) Imagine each day scored in your flesh, you like a telephone pole, notices for Lost Dog, Yard Sale, Event accreting. You are sediment through the millennia, a fossil palimpsest, chalk rising from Foraminifera. Right now, all of your eyes look at me, decades of want brimming over. I wander the dunes of your body, blown new contours each day. The stories you tell of yourself are my only pole star, all other constellations wheeling gossamer. I do not demand that you be otherwise, see in myself the same scraps blown against the fence, the vortex of plastic clotting the ocean. We pick out moments for our Watts Towers, our Castle of the Postman. Only to the shallow do these seem like the monuments of the mad. Our kin stop as at a shrine, sniffing the holy. Advice for the Ages lie down with dogs and you will wake up with fleas, I did and I have, fleet, indestructible, feasting, but the getting of them, arms wrapped about hot beast bodies, was very good. measure twice, cut once, I haven’t and I won’t, hammered boards short and long in urgent constellations, their drunken yawing the whole point. a fool and her money are soon parted, I am and we were, now I fiddle for coins, and sure as rain, will waste whatever largesse falls into my hat. the truth stands on two legs, a lie on one, and a lie to oneself lies prostrate in the dirt, I have placed boot on dusty cheek, considered pressing with all my weight. all good things come to an end, they must and they will, but for now, I hold fast over the precipice, crush bones, leave bruises, but do not let go. Bio: Devon Balwit is a writer/educator from Portland, OR. She has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2017: How the Blessed Travel from Maverick Duck Press, and Forms Most Marvelous from dancing girl press. Her work has found many homes, among them: The Ekphrastic Review, The NewVerse News, Vector Press, Work to a Calm, Sweet, and more.
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