Building A Nest Much More Complicated Poem by Rhys Owens

You cannot remember this:
I don't expect you to remember.
All the same…
Can you remember the time
We fell in love? —
That old song…
Does it bring anything back with it,
Out of the polyphonic rhizome,
Medium-haunted about you?

Disney Baby, it wasn't me;
Because I wasn't the Beast for long.
Only ugly,
Till there was you:
Marian at a breakfast club;
You, Marian of my thievery.

I grew too many brown
And tender shades of grey.
…Not as ferocious, maybe,
In my social world, but,
Truly, I have none…

So give up that stagnant Frog Prince pond;
And come back to the beast that needs you.
I can't help I'm not as ugly as I used to be,
I can't help that beauty sadness brings.
…But I can help you, Beauty.
—I can give you a name…

Not some general descriptive:
"Beauty is as beauty does…"
No, my cancelled lady,
What's in a name,
But everything?

I can give you my own name, o.k.?
But if I have to bring the ribbons,
Or work out an elaborate shining
Rather than the shining of my eyes;
If I have to sing the same old songs
In a new style, in a newly invented tune,
It's going to take a while.

There's going to have to be a new sense,
A more than casual presentation,
Than you're used to,
To digest.
—You're going to have
To meet me halfway,
At the new equator of your mind,
If this is going to work.

You can't understand fairy tales.
What with the cyber unconscious
Collecting digital taxes,
And your scattered faith in tragedy:
Love is a confusion of cognate pain.

"My cycles! My cycles!
My cycles and contradictions, all the same! "
I hear you cry, like a nightingale of old;
But not like the nightingale, don't you know?
—Don't leave me at this cerebral impasse:
Christina! How's that? I call you out!
What do you think of that tune?

You're not Beatrice.
You're not Maud Gonne; but you're no Helen of Troy.
You leave me everywhere.
As I go through the streets of this town,
Hallucinating Christina.
Muttering to myself
With lips closed.

Remember how you always said, "we're not a people"?
As far as I'm concerned, I'm still not a people.
I don't know about you…

It's been an uphill fight,
And I can see myself fighting all the way
Back down to where I started;
Where you can start again.
Your cycles.