C.J.Sellers

“Pensive Parts” by C.J. Sellers

Gazing outward at the windowed sky,
she knew she’d never bear a child her own
because her body, held in hand, felt false despite
her breasts were hammers, harder than a mother’s charged.

Thankfully, her head was soft–so sensibly devoid of hope
in that cheerful hollow where the roots are sown in.
Her smile would always please, just so it never faltered.

Apparent pride turned out her weakest point of all–
there at the neck, her head popped off. Her arms and legs,
too often tested, they too, too easily went awry.
She knew it was too late to ponder now, these past slights
or time or fate or which part once made her most complete.

Her face had not changed except in hue, her hair–all but gone.
This began the year she was discarded. It was then she knew
her impermanent worth. Forlorn, these weather stains remained,
and that fade will not rejuvinate, nor if it could, no, not to new.

And so now she rests against her will and wastes interminable hours
remembering the joy of usefulness, feeling an echo of inappropriate love–
too passionate kisses once forced upon her: peck, peck, peck,
tapped against her heart like a bare branch against a closed window,
like an unsatisfied woodpecker at the sill.

“Put-in-Bay O.” reads the sporty flag that hangs behind
the generations seated neatly: my great-grandma and pa
come a long ride in their best for this–the wedding and
now photo of their oldest daughter, Anne, with Claude.

Grandpa Ira–shy-eyed farmer under bowler hat–wears black,
but bright seersucker, blue-eyed Claude–trolley-runner–sports his
straw hat tilted back, sideways cigar tucked into a grinning maw.
Claude’s tall, out of knickerbockers, both legs well in the long pants now.

Grandma Edna–fancy-hatted, long of dress–rides the chair sidesaddle
in her high-laced boots. Hands rest on lap, she’s glanced demurely to the side.
Annie–Mona Lisa under lace–sits rigid-backed, ankles-shown and legs too wide,
front-faced to the post-card making guy behind his newfangled camera box.
Her eager eyes look amused and wild as if to say, “What’s next? Let’s go.”

by C.J.Sellers

Your eyes are the stairs I’d never again go down,
not even when the light was on.
Grasping, before the hidden switch was found,
safe, from the stairtop I’d peer down to where world-light
streamed through dusty darkness from some glassy cinder-blocks.
The light stopped far short of the old oak cask lording the unturned dirt
floor, long ago soaked and soaked again with bourbon–still there,
its brine souring the gloom up to the floorboards with a vintage musk of neglect.
Your vacant eyes remind me of the silent poverty of that place
and its aberrant hole in the far wall I’d once ventured too near.
I’d stood before it assaulted by the stench of age
from the crumbling crawlspace. Where did it lead to?
If I’d sunk my hands down in that dank,
forbidden earth, would rotting hands have
reached back to snatch and pull me through?
I might have tried it just to know the rest but you rescued me
with your scoldings and Grampa followed with his threats
of fetching a good switch to teach me a lesson
not to go down there again. You said
you were convinced I didn’t need it yet. Instead,
you sat me in a chair with a cup of beer and stroked my hair
’til I forgot. It chokes me now to see you lost.
You’ve gone in and shouldn’t you know better?
Isn’t this the lesson that you kept me from?
I watch you absent there and wonder if
now I should be saving you
but no answer comes and so 
I press your withered hand in mine and
pray I find a switch.

by C.J. Sellers

“Josmar Trujillo is trying to cross the bridge
from Reactionary to Revolutionary.”

And what of them! Those rarefied American Elms
Ulmus americana, the White Elms that boomed large,
clustered and towering, condemning the new and young
with damning shade after all these many years of
enjoying their grace and wealth of sun.

They complain of us yet see how in winter they don’t mind
the young fodder or whatever’s down there that works and dies–
our corpses hide their tender roots all day and night.
Do the poor saps warm from obligation or is it fate
where in shade the progeny fell and when?

Tree of Heaven, Josmar Trujillo exclaims (in hate),
What of this old forest? Fuck this usury, I say good firewood.
Though these sprouts are lost, so what, they would have been.
When the smoke clears, there at the base, generations
of diversity to live free amid the blessed sun!

So say we all, as Josmar echoes Che, “Vive la Revolución!”
Come lightning, come wind, spark! Bring it all down in flames
and the young leaves of the cultivar, American Liberty
will be the first of us to dance amid the ash
and stretch to face the sun again.

by C.J. Sellers

“I must be cruel only to be kind.”~Shakespeare, Hamlet

It occurred to her, in the shower, how
she, a writer, could call herself a sculptor.
Like cleansing, it began as an ambition to be finer

but as it turned out, her life’s art was not
revealing the form within the raw mass
but from the randomness of her life–

she saw herself wanting to find shape.
Intentioned hands feel their way around
like a world-maddened blind man’s that spread

over a lover’s face, seeking recognition.
As augurs seeking portents, these hands
are clumsy gods of clays, waxes, butters,

they, hot knives, cleave grace from error,
they strike and gouge at hard stubbornness
and only mollify in retrospect,

as each piece deemed chaff is dead
wood, stone, or clay that must/needs fall away
they comfort as it, reminding, pleads its case.

by C.J.Sellers

White hair, blue suits and red lips
ruled the decorous front line.

She wandered up like a silly duck
about to squawk at lions.

She stood tall for a child,
at the podium, as all the rest had,
even those two, three times her age.

She’d walked up there to protest,
but to their surprise, she talked about
the voice itself in a sing-song way.

She let her voice go high
and then very low and swung her arms wide
and up as if she really would just give up

And one leg pitched out to the side.
She might have even flapped.
I don’t recall what all she said
amid this circus act.

The whole room was confused smiles
and silence before she walked away.

Defying sense,
the old folks spent millions on a new
nuclear weapons plant that day.

by C.J. Sellers

She’s running away to a Nevada bordello.
Knuckles spell out a  N-E-U-R   O-T-I-C  plea.
Hitch a ride with a truck-stop hello.
She’s running away.

Unmasked, there’s not much these ringed cat’s eyes don’t see.
Dark cobalt dreads bunched in a black bow.
Below, orange roots show and tell. This world ain’t free.

Where her breast folds sleeves of a tattooed bolero,
scarred veins snake to a laden tree.
Just needs some fast cash to blow.
She’s running away.

by C.J.Sellers

you there who are a bullet
and the gun and the hand and the wound
not knowing your without or within
you think you cannot know your purpose
until the action or the war’s won

you don’t see start, trajectory, or end all
you think, you lose, you win, you wind eternal
you nonsense exegesis spectacle

you think this is your heart’s now
you think this is your place here
you feel you know the reason anyhow

you thief, cop, martyr, monkey, Hyperborean
shoot your godsend, suck the treason, wile
fuck, breed, eat, shit, beat, breathe, dial

you think you are between or as you are
you tower, you to and from
you sweet and salt of

you one, you one, you one
you one of many who make your one
you body, cell, nucleus, quantum, logos, holy ghost

you seed, planet, universe
you’re flat, you’re round, you’re diaphanous
you’re subjective and objective as

you god, you speak your logos wrong
you speak it like a web to catch all
you fateful aspect spinning sins and angels

you past, you present, you future danger
you part and participle, noun
you solo, orchestral, polyphonic child

you sun and moon, you all and nothing
you lives, you deaths, you births
you sentient, loud and silent sound

you unity of all of
you one who has no name to speak of
you who is and is of
[...]

by C.J.Sellers

Woman is a jar of untold jellybeans.
Who keeps a jar of jellybeans? Why?
Who wants a jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who knows the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who owns the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Answer: Just the woman. I say it oughtta be the law.

by C.J. Sellers

Willy blasts into the air in an iconic splash, escaping the bad men’s wrath faster than I could have plunged into its ocean depths. And to see this, I should thus feel suddenly more human?

Of course, the movie pushed all the right buttons, I wept, I laughed, I felt suspense but because I am who I am, in some ways, predetermined, I get the sense afterward, that of some things, the human is too curious and vainglorious for its to-some-irrelevant revelations. We are too proud of our “inherent” sentience and emotion. We give the animal a human name–”Willy” for the kids. But that’s just where it begins, this anthropomorphizing anything from God to black fish.

“Free Willy”, a play on “free will”.

The sick plea behind this movie is that our prey must have a human face before we spectators, can’t help ourselves but agree not to contain, hunt, kill it, or call it prey. By omission of threat, we are free to call it friend. That is “Free Willy”.

Where is the respect for Orca as it is? It is not cute. It carries its steely knives at the fore whereall it goes, rather than behind its back as us. That is not a human face. Why pretend? It offends my sense of otherness necessary to understand this world’s true wholeness in which human is a pestilence.

Skinner would ask, why do we hastily determine an animal can be “freed”? Is it due to apparent sentience? We are sentient. Are we free? Are you sure of that? Do we all agree? This has yet to be confirmed through logic or dogma, so in Willy’s defense toward the nature of default, mankind’s “free will” is simply a matter of opinion.

Roman men named Orcus a god of the underworld. Orca is a hunter of whales, yes, which is the largest of all living things but he’s as complex as our senator or Caesar in his domain. Yet we’d make him a kid’s pet? Rather predictable, yes? Does it help to understand the Orca any better to do this, or not just us as slavers, saps, and showmen?

Wittgenstein would say if I had an interpreter for a dog’s language, what would it matter? Just as, can I know what it is to know the dolphin’s life or the nature of its fate? We both breath air, may eat the same foods, both birth live kin, we are both gods and demons, but touch his skin and my repugnance tells–it is alien. I could press my lips against its flesh but would I as I’d kiss some random human being? Even if I felt disgust, this distaste is not the same from whale to human.

If I could lock Willy in a pen and feed him mammals or fish, “amazing” what good friends we’d become. We’d be more than. I’d be master of him but am I master if I then compulsively serve Mammon?

Am I comforted that the Orca eats the thing that would eat me? Therefore, we are friends? This is as the proverb goes and again, “It is good to strike the serpent’s head with your enemy’s hand.”

Because I am not to his appetite’s affinity then I am not his enemy?
Because I don’t eat the mammals he eats therefore, we are friendly?

What does this “friendship” mean? What is this obsession of human’s to find meaning? Is it shared by him? If so, how can I know what it means to him and not just what it would mean to me if I were him? As if I could ever be.

If “Free Willy” had been beached. I could walk a mile of sand to look into just one of his large eyes, imagined enormous to match his girth and wit, fierce and fiery as alleged thirst for vengeance. But what if it’s blank and dark and weak, as small as the palm of my hand? Is he then like us?

The sounds he would make, chirps and coos, more like a bird of prey than a baby man are these anything I could understand even if I had a dolphin lexicon?

Tell all this to the Orca. He could not care less. The sounds that come to him are as meaningless. I’m just saying, I stand at the shoreline, human. To his ocean, I can do no more than delve a toe in!

I could stroke his spanse as a connoisseur or a lover and he, with no arms to resist this, dumb to my language to even protest, and I of a species that contains rapists, he’d on land, succumb to the rape of my imposed friendship.

I exploit him now just to write about him much less make a movie about us or pay money to watch our adventure “together”. A spectator is not innocent.

On land, how easily I could skin him thus, strip him bare just to see what’s underneath and some humans do in fact, do this. Good thing he has no convenient, toothless orifice. Just let him try to grow legs and traverse the sand to look straight into mankind’s great and glorious face.

I could kill and eat this contender just as easily as he could hunt down a shark for its liver, in our avarice. But there’s a difference. He eats for food, Human consumes for mere amusement and entertainment.

I will prove to you I am his master, here he is “Free Willy” trapped on DVD. He is forever immortalized thus and his only escape is our thirst for novelty will eventually render this conception of him bland and tasteless.

Someday, the human, for its ignorance and proliferation that rapes the land and now the sea, may one day soon eat its own weak and while the Orca may hunger for the food it lost to us, its avarice and cunning is not as great as it needs to be to survive our trust.

It must grow armor and harden its teeth to torpedo our ships. It must toxify the fish with a poison to which it hopes to form a resistance. It must stake claim to its domain by freezing it with a glacial crust. And if it does all this, then it may become human. And then it will know of man’s inhumanity.

Already, I am developing a taste for Orca.
Someday soon, Willy, you’ll be mine.

But for now, while I can I would rather leave the Orca alone to its mysteries, free to be whatever it is, wherever, and at the very least,
blessedly, anonymously inhuman.

[Author's note:  Title refers to behavior psychologist,  B.F. Skinner and the movie, "Free Willy".  ]