Lonely Body Work Poem by MARINA GIPPS

I’ve got a holy chalice that needs some bowing down to;
needs a little worshipping, a body temple of time slipping.
A heavy musician in Kansas city, floating yet drowned
in her own music, people laugh at me when I count calories.
Don’t watch me when I open my mouth to blow, only eat.
Banks of people surge to the surface: upriver going down
on well-dressed trousers in the audience.
Somebody died at this jam session but it wasn’t me.
I became pork chops as they pulled his body away.
A huge mafia plot hanging so I escaped
to a great ship with Marlon Brando onboard (before he got fat) .
He asked me if I needed some lonely body work.
'No, thank you', I said smiling like apple pie (hating apple pie) .
I’m on my way to Hollywood, I think, but I also wonder,
“Yo Mar, where are we going? ”
'To an infantry war', Brando says.
Upon hearing this, I am four years old and so is he.
And we both have real guns in our hands.
I hold mine to the moonlight as I figure
Attila battleships in the distance when all others
supposed them dead. Go figure—I sounded
like a kid too stoned for her own good.
“This is everywhere”, Brando tells me.
Now I’m older, wish I was sinking under
the coral streets of a lost sea city.
The devil visits me at this point.
The devil visits everyone at this point.
Sometimes the guns get more violent with every thought.
The night is a spilt belly of a girl who lost her baby.
Marl says, “Like a boy who became a potent man
speckled on a sea of globe…”

A boy who hadn’t daydreamed like me,
realized the disagreeable tenement’s a reality;
That reprimands are afraid to die

Who’s dreaming this?

I open my arms upon remembering
final contemplations of temples
at the end of a pier where I hear tenor horns
erupting into the light ahead of the sea.