Style

“Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness.” Quentin Crisp
(“Hmm. Well, style is until it isn’t.” Andy Stone)

How else but obliquely angled? – darting like a bird –
then hushed: determined for a trembling moment to be still –
before it blinked and shot somewhere within to gird
its loins for the inevitable lunge its hungrily awaiting
world could be depended on to make toward them –

the felt resources and effects of which inhabited the flesh
like some fresh virulence for which there surely wasn’t
any cure – a fever levered pure into eternal stark assault:
forever at the brink of sinking every bit of thinking aimed
at balancing; the halt and shoddiness of every lame attempt

to meet its body’s power! – match its serendipity, stare
down its haughty glower – who is this alien creature who
fills out the hour? – then it pops, a bubble, sweet frail mist:
and something Other lists and slithers into view, a slowly
coiling serpent whose faint hiss reminds you of another

whisper: day comes: dream ends; suddenly you wonder if
your mother’s style was not perhaps suggested by
the fleet and serpentine: not something you’d have thought
before this rocking dawning reverie. You conjure up two
things she never did she said she wanted to: pick up

some extra-crispy KFC dark meat and buttered biscuits that
she saw in TV ads; and go to Norway, board a boat and sail
from fjord to fjord. Well, maybe this all counts for nothing
more than demonstrating your own style in sieving
nonsense into glory. You are responsible for your own story.


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