Season 1, Episode 007: Flip the Precarious Culmination

Guilliean reads three of her poems; read along with the poems while you’re listening!

Flip the Script

It had to look real.
                            Bruise had to be shaped just so.
                                                                               Lampshade swayed like Newton's law.
                                                                                                                                            Equal but opposite.
                                                                          It was the only heavy object within reach.
                                                 Timed carefully.
      The neighbors would hear.
                                               They would see his car in the driveway.
                                                                                                           The wound would be temporary, Band-Aid.
                                                                            This house; a prison,
                                   An expensive gilded cage.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Culmination

I'm trying to recall
How it felt to have
A country home in your arms

The scent of your cologne
Blinds the fiber of my being
A party as the world ends

The beat of your heart
Unsweetened lemonade
On the tongue of my skin

I used to excite your molecules
False oxygen in your brain
Fired by the microwaves of touch

Is there a space for me
at your table for two
I make coffee for you

in the A.M.
Like you were real
Like you're not in my bones

Wear not my crown, the one I bought you
To hide your gray hairs
That I didn't mind as much as you

Eighteen months later
Love heart like water into the gutter
Echoes on the empty McMansions

Slinging profanity, vain words
Of the love and devotion
I used to feel, about us

About you, you selfish cunt
When all I wanted was you
That's all I ever wanted.

Photo by Laura Kapfer on Unsplash

The Precarious Position

Walk a perfect circle around me,
Quietly observe my happily married peers,
some with kids, some not, but never alone.
I don't see the start of that world for me ever,
and I feel strangely fine.

Liberation opened doors for my gender,
to choose or not to choose,
but sometimes, perhaps only when I breathe,
my Catholic guilt suggests
I should crash into a twist of fate.

I wasn't supposed to end up like Mme. Bovary,
her concepts of life guided by books,
the trajectory of her existence based on the romance,
never living life, merely thrust into it,
like the sound of a kick drum.

I was supposed to have seen the world by now,
a blitzkrieg of light in the form of knowledge.
London, Paris, Tokyo, Madrid.
Trapped in a snow globe of dust and cactus,
Measured as a lengthy self-inflicted bender,
weeping in some dark abscess of neon.

What does heaven look like to an angel?
Is it the same as ours? 
Is it guided by instinctively knowing?
And what is heaven to an angel anyways?
Do they need to drive towards that perfection, like the rest of us do,
or do they travel there in books, as the rest of us do?

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