What Rough Beast | Poem for March 30, 2019

Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 8)

Fit in the head and they start to crowd one another into coils of strings      Of long convolutions of head speech words crowding other words almost      Hurting one another the way they must if there’s not space for them to      Be in the same place for long they must be let out to prance to breath      To show off their worthiness to show off their brilliance their sparkle      But not if they can’t be seen all crowded and glopped up together      Like soggy spaghetti over done into a paste let out the voice let it out      To let in the voices the other voices that want to come in be safe from      All that coldness out there you have to have a relation to form and shape      Otherwise it’s a mess and others can’t enjoy like mushy overdone pasta      One pasta for all forever and ever amen one and all one perception leading      Superseding immediately to another content being form being content

Editor’s Note: “Find the Form to Love Your Life” is a long poem that we are posting in eleven sections on consecutive Saturdays.

Lydia Cortes is the author of the poetry collections Lust for Lust (Ten Pell Books, 2002) and Whose Place (Straw Gate Books, 2009). Her work appears in the anthologies Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times (U Mass Press, 2006) and Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012 (Editorial Campana, 2012). Recent work has appeared in Upstreet and on the Black Earth Institute’s 30 Days Hath September poetry feature curated by Patricia Spears Jones.

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