Jules Gibbs

Ponderous Weapon

To grow into a woman is to grow thick
with truth its weight, its objective
uselessness, its huge feet, its dick. High above
sea level the men go on squawking
in the rarified air the way echoes from the Big
Bang still coo as primordial gravity waves
in outer space — it’s true — cosmic booms so
small we don’t hear. The truth is we listen to
men more than we listen to outer space attuned
to the cluster of teenaged white boys, the explosive
noise of all the unearned power they hoard —
we cross the street so their truth will not see
or touch us and think: Shut up Shut up. Keep our back-
talk stored in the dresser drawer, keep it low until what’s in it
lives clean and beyond any man’s reach. Until our inner
space is silent as the ponderous weapon we carry. The truth is that
elephants hold funerals, caress the flesh and bones
of their dead. They travel long distances to do this to caress
with the trunk’s tender finger the flesh and bones
of their dead. Sweet beast — in truth you rape the white
rhino then kill it with your tusks, but when the gentle
savanna rains prick your skin you can’t endure
the pain and sink into the river for relief.

Cost

A Slovenian Marxist philosopher travels to the desert with a film crew
to deconstruct pleasure. He sits in the dunes and sips Coke

from thick glass bottles the Khmer Rouge used to store its fascist
ideology in the form of expired medicine. A death investment.

His drink is getting warm, he says, excremental — How much, he asks,
would you pay for his drink? How much for the eternal? The cure?

Should we buy it or steal? How long until poets are paid by line, word, feel?
His point is that the healthy people are full of shame, entrails shellacked

in wheatgrass and flax, as the rest corrode in the more of the less, a dying
galaxy’s fizzle that tickled O’Hara’s cilia just before the hum of the dune buggy

that crushed him, the it rising in excess. As creatures of global markets, there’s no way
to do it guilt-free — even a breath owns shares in pain; your non-death

the finite space you take up, the pile of cash
you hoard for some future pleasure. What would you pay

to be the woman who mouths his florescent orange tulips
around the birches?

How much for the exclusive right to be alive enough to sip a Coke
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light?

For O’Hara’s death to slip through your spiracles with his intelligent
giddiness, and leave you sick, mute, broke?