She was broken,

I could see that from far off,

the bend in her knees,

blended of tension and fatigue.

She was hurting

you could tell by how her breath came,

she’d breathe,

a painful intake,

needles of frozen air in hot lungs.

She was much larger

than the place she borrowed

from the cosmic debit of time and space.

She was much more shallow

than the deep well of her eyes.

She had transparent beauty,

Sharpie-scrawled political boundaries

mapped like a blueprint over her body.

She was divided against herself.

“This, THIS you may see,

my public domain,

the high, white domes and spires

of capitol facades.

10/17/2003

Author's Note: Are all readings pretentious?? I'm starting to think it's inherent to the art. Anyways, I wrote this at a moderatley pretentious reading in a coffee place with 'shabby chic' decor and a hot barista. The real high pionts were the real country prose and poetry a few people wrote about their childhoods in rural Kentucky and Southern Indiana. One line stuck with me "Time is the great magnifier." That was a good line. Any event I wrote this to the tune of some woman really yowling with her guitar (if she were Hispanic, I'd equate her with Cisneros, but we all know Sandra'd never be caught dead in a counter-culture coffee house.) It's so much more, I dunno, 'mainstream pretention' than most of my stuff, and I had to take out a whole extended metaphore in the middle that went on a tangent about the Fire of London and Sir Christopher Wren that really made no sense whatsoever (makes me wonder what that song was about...) so most of the real architectural references are gone, but I kept the title anyway because I liked it. (Don't you hate it when the Author's Notes are longer than the work itself?? Seems so damned PRETENTIOUS!!!)

Posted on 10/17/2003
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