from Pain Imperatives

You have to slap yourself in the face with a mohair glove

You have to challenge yourself to a mini duel

You have to rub your hands on your thighs and think about pain

A little pain comes on, and you get tiresome again

The past is a bad invention that keeps on happening

And it hurts to think about, like an unpaid bill

It’s like the wind dragging the desert backwards at night

& it burns you, like a little pastel whip 

The moral of poetry is too lonely to be written

It’s a sad old hygiene, like Cleopatra’s hand soap

It’s like using a jackhammer to bust open a music box

The box cracks and minor notes come drifting out

This is like breathing through a megaphone

or begging for mercy with a Russian phrasebook

I write this poem like an obituary in comic sans                

I write it like suicide hotline hold music

This is a raunchy philosophy, like losing your virginity to Plato

It’s like doing a line of sherbet off a toilet seat

This is a teenage sadness, like going to sleep in a prom-dress

It’s like putting on mascara to cry yourself to sleep 

Poetry should be democratic—that’s the modern view

It’s like a murder on a train where everyone did it

This is an inclusive misery, like crying someone else to sleep

It’s the sugared hole at the top of the mountain where the flag goes in

This is an extravagant poverty—like an IOU in a stripper’s underpants

It’s like wet sequins blowing down the highway strip

This is a chaste vulgarity, like a well starched nipple tassel

It’s like opening your raincoat to reveal another raincoat

Poetry is a fake nostalgia, like dollhouse curtains flapping in the breeze

It rears up behind you on its antique leg brace

This is a swarm of bees rising out of the piano

This is an encore to an empty auditorium 

Who was it that said “the life we enter is not the one we leave?”

It’s an arcane law, like falling out of love

It’s like a game of musical chairs, but they keep adding more chairs

You get up to leave, but the music goes on and on

Hera Lindsay Bird

Hera Lindsay Bird is a Wellington poet currently on hiatus in Dunedin. She was the 2011 winner of the Adam Prize.