Prose Poem: Eileen Sullivan

Epic Mimicry and Studied Elegance

Too late to write. Too early to sleep. Too tired to talk. Too wired to stop. My night drifts into your day. Guitar too heavy to lift. Songs too hard to hear. The bed beckons, one side bursting from the wealth of books, the other empty, expecting my acceptance, my shallow shuddering breathing. And all we know is what we learned, and what we learned is all we know. We know it all except the secrets of our hearts. We live and pose, facsimile, until the feeling starts. One hears words, another a song. Both a dirge and somehow wrong. And the moon looks on at the fools, its laughter ripples the heavens, waves of undulating mirth that never reach the earth.

Silicon by Eileen Sullivan

I want silicone, she told me.
Long piercing needles of it
pumped into my lips, grown thin
and uninviting after years of clamping
down on impulsive retorts or admonitions.

I want silicone, wobbly, gel-like bags
of improbable size, not real, not even trying
for lifelike, but more a pillow of simulated womanhood
placed strategically to gain the attention
of goggle-eyed men who prefer
their women to appear fertile and voluptuous
but can’t bear the tug and pull of life, the
gravity of earth like the moon's pull
on the sea, life-giving fluid now approximated,
saline in a plastic, zip-lock buxom reality.

I want silicone, or yellow glutinous fat from my ass
withdrawn by a syringe and inserted
in the creases of my face where the years of sadness
and loneliness have creased my smile into a strain
of parenthetical pain, to inject that excess ass
into my most revealing place, the smile that once
came just at the thought of him and now has
sunken like a grave, neglected and ancient,
the dust from which we come, returning to earth,
drawing the hope from my face into rivulets of ravaged love.

I want life’s sweet poison, once the bane
of mothers who would cook without preservatives,
never knowing if something rancid might
be served beside the fresh bread. This poison,
we once were told, exploded and swelled aluminum cans
we were instructed to avoid. But now I want that
inflation taken from a test tube, or bad can of beans,
no longer care, and injected into my forehead
where great crevasses of dismay and confusion have
made the geological time of marriage carve deep
lonely lines, and I want it to change the face of this earthly body.

I want my ass hoovered like some sort of recalcitrant
turkey, reluctant to release its giblets bag, emptied of fat,
penetrated again and again with a long hose,
a rape of the moonlike curves of my body
grown full and distinctly lower from age, from life.

Until I am silicone, every last loveable part a lie,
how shall I ever live a real life? How can love be real
unless every last loveable part has become facsimile,
including his love.