A Salmon Merlot.

This is another old poem of mine, and to be honest I'm not sure
how I feel about it. I think it's something like embarrassment
 with the occaisonal pinprick of enjoyment.
Just so you know I am going to be away for another week, I'm
headed out of town in about an hour as of the time I'm
writing this. But I am leaving for reasons pertaining to
creative writing, so don't think I'm slacking. That also means
the potential for some fun, new blog posts when I return.
I'll be seeing you. (:

You’d say humanity looks like a dead trout,
squished like lunchmeat
between layers of ice in a fish mart.
You’d say she’s long gone;
left on the Oregon Trail and never came back.
Silence yourselves
naysayers, pessimists, curmudgeons.
No,
Humanity survives in feeling.
To be human is to
think, err, feel, breathe, love, triumph
deeply.
As deeply as that wine stain on the carpet,
the one united to the very fibers,
that even the Stanley Steemer guys
with their presumptuous, boa constrictor-like hoses
can’t make surrender.
As long as the feelings are true,
As long as vulnerability lives,
somewhere in Freud's country
Humanity persists
in her fantastic omnipresence.

Her emotions bend at awkward angles.
She’s melancholy hysterical.
Sensation exploded from stewing too long
under Plath’s bell jar.
She rears her beautiful head
through that beautiful dent in the wall there.
Where your wine bottle erupted like Krakatau
when drunkenness and art proved to be false escapisms
from Despair’s chasm.

Critics say
Picasso’s blue period painted the road to insanity
yet in the words of the Hatter, “we’re all mad here.”
They snake through a table set for English tea
like blood cantering to the cheeks.
A byproduct of a subtle, elephant-in-the-room madness.
Rage like acid and fire,
positively caustic, acerbic, acrid in its chemical reactions.
Humanity,
She isn’t test tubes and lab coats,
she’s emotion.
Gullet throttling, entrail searing
ire
that presides over and feasts to
bar fights and trashy reality show brokenness
exulting with the face deflating suckerpunches and
bitter hair yanking.
Actions divested to the instinct
from a wine that now leaps like salmon onto hair and clothes
and carpet.

Jam your thumb into the off button
ignorance is bliss,
heaven,
nirvana,
the ending of an Austen novel
where Lizzie Bennet’s guffaws
can be heard from the streets outside.
A good mood like a summer’s day,
like faultless happiness.
Tickling heat and blatantly perfect breezes
you can simply picnic in.
Not even a drop of wine on the linens
can empty such internal sunshine.

Humanity’s tumultuous rollercoaster,
nay, Humanity’s turbulent theme park.
It is sadness, anger, happiness.
It is depression, rage, ecstasy.
It is bunching up skirts, throwing back hair
and living vicariously through the raindrops
that stain the earth in purity.