MONOLOGUE BEYOND MIDNIGHT

Rachel Rabbit White

“Plus, ‘I like sultry avenging birds. ‘Terrible birds with moisturized wings over the sea.”

 Chelsey Minnis

poetry gave me this sickness

I think the sky is mine

its pollution is mine,

I want to use my body for pain

to throw my hands in the air

the sky’s dazzling grief

“what do they know about being a bird!” 

all that moisturized gliding 

they say pity is extolled as virtue

“the poet is a sort of prostitute,” wrote

Nietzsche, who failed this

a poet should live near the water

a prostitute near a harbor 

where the meeting of certain atmospheres 

and birds seem no different than cats

folded comfortably in their plumage

the sky which forms,

which flaps around me like

love, like death, I’m told

it eventually strikes!

everything of value has its cost

let us take our pleasure!

it’s madness! pleasure

free and aimless we flutter, etc. 

but in nascent knowing I must 

bite the stone 

writhe in my sinking 

trapped in format of bed

I stroke my withdrawal

return to same, in air

I have turned against, thirsting

for all that gliding, the more I become rooted in

rising up, turning away from and toward

evil, violence is an exacerbation of instability 

and every poem turns against the poet

in my gratitude I turn over

what the gods didn’t give me

I wanted so badly

my limbs emit pangs of imagined horizons

poetry to impress the gods

and lend the reader moisturized wings

I’d sell my body for that

Rachel Rabbit White's (@rabbitwhite) first full length collection, Porn Carnival, is out now with Wonder Books. She’s the host and organizer of Ceremony, a monthly reading series in New York City.