xxanastasiaxx

ummmm..
what happened?
I'm not liking this at all!!!
is it just me or is anyone else hating having to scroll
all the way down to find friends on their friend's
list?

anyway..

It's journal poetry day again. Haven't had time to write so I am posting one of my favorite Margaret Atwood poems instead. Happy Wednesday!

Helen Of Troy Does Counter Dancing

The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had a the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self respect and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and with out material form.
Exploited, they'd say.
Yes any way you cut it, but I've a choice
of how and I'll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision
like perfume ads, desire.
or it's facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worst suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see a chain saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because they can't. The music
smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and langurous
as a looted city the day after, when all the rape's
been done already and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage to eat, and there's only a bleak
exhaustion.

Speaking of which, it's the smiling tires me out the most.
THis, and the pretence that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because i'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham, but I come from the
province of the gods where meanings are lilting
and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone, but lean close, and I'll
whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You belive that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me and feel
nothing.
Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive in my own body.
They'd like to see through me
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look- my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.