🌀 Now Playing “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)” by Florence + The Machine

“There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.”

—Metropolis (1927)

Back in Service.

You’ve entered a place where poetry isn’t distributed by algorithm or approval, but by intuition, accident, and emotional voltage.

As I worked on the image for this post, I couldn’t help but think of the film Metropolis and I combined it with the Spirit of Ecstasy, the hood ornament for the Rolls-Royce, right? My parents owned a copy of the film when I was a kid and I can’t tell you how many times I saw it. This was the unrestored version, so we kinda had to make our own meaning from it. It definitely made an impression.

Like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, this place hums with contrasts:
— slick machine guts and fragile hearts
— the elite logic of intellect and the sweaty engine room of feeling
— the desire to control meaning and the need to be undone by it

In Metropolis, the world is divided—above, the cold architects of power; below, the laboring hands. The story demands a mediator, someone to unite head and hand with heart.

That’s me. That’s the Word Raccoon.
Or maybe it’s you.

This vending machine? It’s not broken anymore.
It’s learned something from being offline.

In the past few weeks, it’s taken me to the PTA.
To the back of my fridge.
To the uneasy corners of womanhood.
To grief that wouldn’t hold still.
To longing, and back again.

I write poems the way I walk through a maze: by not thinking too hard about the turns. Somehow (raccoon logic?)I find the center. I may be still learning, but my heart and intuition tell me there’s something at the center.

So here’s Poetropolis:
A city built of lines and longing, vending what the soul whispers when it thinks no one’s watching.
Architecture by ache. Electricity by accident.
Poems float from the top of the glass dome like prayers or pollution.

It’s Art Deco. It’s divine mess.
It’s powered by the ruins and shine of every poem I didn’t expect to write.

Insert heart. Receive poem.

(Meanwhile, Word Raccoon and I have a date with a certain novel begging for attention, but we’ll be back soon.)