Lillie Franks

Entelechy

The word entelecheia comes from Aristotle
And it means something like “life”
Or “living”
Or “being at work, staying itself”
Or “having its goal within itself”
Something like forgiving yourself
Or asking for help
Or realizing the idea of fading away scares you now
And you’d much rather be held
Close and warm.

Aristotle is something like dead
And so are Sienna and Aquinas
And every other ponderous wag who said
“Follow the rules and no one gets hurt”
Except for the ones who do
(There are too many of those)
None of them understood the word
Entelecheia
I tell myself they didn’t understand
It’s easier that way



I don’t trust easy
It’s too easy
To be at work, becoming someone else
Becoming Aristotle
Becoming a man
Having a goal within the people who scare me
Something like living
The way a bullet flying is something like a bird
But not really


I am a staying thing
I am a being-here-tomorrow machine
I have selfward tendency
I will fall towards myself
The moment the obstacles are gone
Like sinking into warm water
Like being in the one place I was meant to be
The only one that’s shaped like me

I Imagine Myself Dead

I imagine myself dead
Filled with a thousand thousand fungi and bacteria
aspergillus, firmicute, spirochete,
Graveflowers and corpseblooms
A continuance of doing
Inacting
Being at work being at all
This is not death
This is metamorphosis
Hatching, becomposing
The only thing that will not be there
Living, crawling, multiplying
Selving
Is the little mind
That sits in mine
And says
This is me,
The I of the beholder
That says
“I imagine
Myself dead,”
But doesn’t
I imagine a body like me dead
I imagine imagining myself not there
I am always there
In the way
Blocking the stage
If dying is sad
It is not for life
There is always life
There is always lifing
But for the particular ghosts
Who sit in their theaters
And do not think the unthinkable
Who, alone,
Are selfen
Who, alone
is aloned,
Who, alone
Will end
But not yet
Not for as long as they are long

Beauty

There is nothing more beautiful than coming to life
But I own an empty Gatorade bottle,
(flavored orange the color, not the fruit)
That smells of things we gave up wanting
And holds as many needles as I could fit
This is a good solution

Beauty is a process not a moment
But I own a ziploc bag
Of makeup products, mostly useless
With a dried container of clear nail polish
That I wore when I had to act the boy
And knew it
It smells of far away smoke and tears not cried

The girl I am is beautiful
Discovering her was meant to beautiful
But I own a navy blue shirt
With the slightest trace of femme at the collar
Worn till it couldn’t be worn
And that is ugly


All roads go somewhere other than Rome
All paths start beneath feet
The girl I am is beautiful
Not for a moment or a process:
Because we are each other,
Living