WINGLESS BEE
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
I have a bad habit I since rely struggle to read what I’m sup posed to There’s a shelf bookend ed by next up but I let cute covers skip the line Books I promised to enjoy but haven’t cared to I wanted an act of rebellion until it gave me chest pains Like oystercatchers hiding pearls plucked from meat swimming in li quid gold Like a teapot too small for corresponding cups I’m doubting to start she likes me back You want to know a secret I spent most of yesterday trying to get myself to work on something and ultimately did next to nothing which actually felt pretty shitty Enough morning I grab my story teller and sit look ing at every app I had so studiously ignored in the sixty mirrors since I had last stopped to pee Outside, palms rotted this and no other excuse. How tall I get to actually have control when it’s due
*NEW* Though I think art can and should be free, I unfortunately do live in a capitalistic society and am addicted to caffeine. If you want to keep this parasocial poetic relationship going and wanna encourage me to write more silly lil poems, you can now…
Think of yourself as the great Renaissance patron of arts Lorenzo De’ Medici, and me as your humble Leonardo DiCaprio. (Pun intended.) But also don’t give me money. I have a job and savings. I am not asking for money, just creating this option because someone asked if I had one already and I guess this is what “professional” writers do. Look at me now! I am so professional! I am such a writer!
Happy August!
Shout out to my sister and mom for being born in this month, as well as some dear friends and probably nice strangers. August will bring heat, politics, and mosquitos for many of us, but I hope we can all find some respite in between movements.
“Wingless bee” is an off-the-cusp poem in line with some of the other poems I wrote this summer, pondering the intersections of ideals and reality. Swimming around this poem is a quote I’ve been chewing on lately:
The purpose of a system is what it does…[there is] no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. – Stafford Beer
Hmm. I often tell myself what I should be doing (working, planning, acting) when I find myself doing what I want (resting, waiting, thinking) and this leads to all kinds of dissonance (working when I should be resting, thinking when I could just act). The more entrenched in a system of work I find myself, the more the dissonance of should and did grows, despite the promises of how the system is supposed to be. I think this often leads to complacent acceptance of the status quo; we wait for the system to right itself, we wait for our actions to change the system, we wait for the system to produce the promised result, but the reality is just the waiting, not the actualizing.
That’s one of the ideas at the root of this week’s poem, but there are a few other experiments here: some of the language is from AI “bot” Twitter (unfortunately known as X) accounts that randomly followed me, and the form is engaging with a style famously honed by poetry GOAT Eileen Myles (who wrote one of my favorite poems, in case you aren’t familiar with them). This has been a trend of my writing lately: haphazard sources aesthetically arranged by poetic logic. But that’s what is also great about poetry; there’s a subjective truth behind the aesthetic arrangement of seemingly disparate ideas.
In other words, what could bees, books, oystercatchers, teapots, heuristics, systems, and control possibly have to do with each other?
Me.
Which also means you.
Summerly, Ricky