Hotbutt & There Is No Galadriel by Natalie De Paz
Hotbutt
Sitting in traffic listening to jazz with the seat heater on—
Babel babble of the saxophone,
the indulgent wisdom of mistakes.
EVERYONE CAN KNOW WHERE I AM RIGHT NOW.
The other day, I thought that a Pigeon was a drone.
I was crossing one of the many Bridges
I love so hard.
Mischief and optimism are the two sides of a heart,
I’m too stuck against definites to say it’s mine.
The dog growls at nothing,
the cat is never not hungry.
Rain falling against our house
is the sweetest sound to make love to.
I can afford a cliche because it’s free.
Every day, I tell my beloved
I’m fading fast
before falling asleep on the couch.
The blanket lives on the black leather now
under the crystals of a giant vintage floor lamp.
I work at one job while I wait for another to come through.
I shouldn’t care about quitting, but I do.
Every job I quit, I get to keep the friends.
I wonder what will keep me here once they all leave.
A love of the not-mountains?
Seasonal Depression and Summer Pool Passes?
The Bridges, of course.
There is No Galadriel
O, Cynicism: Be a heavy rock and plummet
into the Void from whence you came. We shouldn’t—
though our consciousness runs short— kill
the earth, our World.
The elves aren’t coming to save us.
There is no Galadriel.
Hope, O, Hope, rise on a spiral of invisible heat,
pig on a spit, hole dug in the ground
by the people to feed the people. No more nightmares
of the blood spilled into an ocean between us.
There is no Gandalf.
There is no Frodo to carry our burden,
and Jesus died for our sins Before Capitalism.
Aslan is out of breath and Lyra is tired of lies,
Alice doesn’t have it in her to be lost anymore.
There is the matter of Arthur, his round table the myth
upon which our glass house is built. Or
was it cards, or was it straw? O, Imagination
deliver us not from reality but into reality glistening
with the honey and vinegar of new life.
