Agency

My favorite memory was nature.

I still remember this

from the time

before I was chosen

for indoctrination.

A time before my instruments

were trained on beauty,

before I discovered

I could make my own 

weather.

Since then, 

everything I’ve done,

I’ve done as an agent

on an urgent mission,

under my own surveillance,

employed by an agency

that has never revealed itself.

I receive messages 

via what is likely an implant

buried in a head of cabbage.

Plucked from obscurity

as an abandoned child

and trained by calamity

(I was once made to eat

my own vomit),

Still, I never talked.

My nervous breakdown at 17

saw me sever ties with any hope

for a normal life.

All my experiences became assignments.

When I uncovered love

(or did love uncover me?),

I was already working for the agency.

The slightest show of affection

would have me bombarded with spasms

of permeating discomfort. 

I remember how my heart 

often felt like an open wound.

Here’s the thing: 

Love is an overt betrayal

of the agency’s principles.

Love makes you vulnerable

to un-vetable outside forces. 

Every foray into the illogic

of loving risks

endangering your mission.

I have now worked for the agency

for what amounts to my entire life,

often moving to another city 

when exposed.

My adventures have been marked by

small, inconspicuous successes.

As an agent

friendships are rare, if impossible.

Friendliness is only encouraged 

as an intelligence strategy.

Unable to make enemies

even with an enemy

and because of fear of exposure,

my personal opinions 

have been rendered pointless.

I am not here

to accumulate likes and dislikes

like so many joys or unpleasantness.

It is forbidden for me to object.

I am not here to pleasure myself.

My pleasure is viewed 

as a form of betrayal.

I could choose to confess.

An old spy is not a young spy

and a reckoning is surely coming.

I am working for the agency

at the expense of any right

to the most mundane

gesture of selfishness.

As a boy I learned 

to observe others

by surveilling myself:

On home base

I wasn’t just holding the bat,

I observed myself

holding the bat

while the other boys had fun,

I had already been inducted

and hiding

in plain sight.

Truth is, I was chosen because

I was attractive to the enemy,

vulnerable and without family ties,

and I had an undeniably open heart.

So many avenues would have

been possible for me,

except for the most valuable: 

Simple being.

Imagine for a moment

working for a clandestine agency

where you have never met the boss

face to face,

where proving your worth

is based on your ability to blend in,

to appear to belong no matter

where you find yourself,

but never truly belonging.

Your smallest everyday exchange

is an experience to be infiltrated

rather than lived.  

From your first glimmer 

of sexual awakening

you are groomed as a prostitute

and encouraged to use your sex

in exchange for information.

When you went rogue and experimented

as you often have

using your sexuality for escape

rather than leverage,

you were made ill 

and confined

to your bed

like Ingrid Bergman in Notorious.

For years I became convinced

the agency was working

out of the basement 

of a local evangelical church.

Maybe that way 

I could imagine myself

a noble experiment,

an enigma,

something futile

yet holy.

I live my life by a series of codes.

First code of conduct:

No one says what they mean.

I may say what I mean

only after extraction.

After all,

words are for disguising what is.

Second code of conduct:

People hide their weaknesses.

And I am not allowed to show strength.

Be always a valley

as water flows ever downward

like love to an empty cup.

There are other rules:

Do not draw attention to yourself.

Do not become famous for anything.

Do not fraternize with other agents.

Do not be ugly, angry, or mean.

And also some do’s:

Be simple and kind, not complicated.

Be approachable, unpretentious, and polite.

Occasionally use curse words.

Do not appear perfect.

Last night I scribbled a note 

on the inside of a book of matches

and tossed it from a height.

Lucky for me, I found it.

The note read: 

Find that thing

that touches

everything you think.

God, beauty, love, 

pleasure, fear, desire….

Then meet me there.

They’re onto you.

Peter Valentyne

September 2018

How I Live With 

What I Know

My morning begins

with extrication;

separating myself

from the dream

like a soldier

with PTSD

condemned to relive

the horrors of a war

no one else 

remembers.

Crawling out

of it’s freighted

plot line

as from

a cave opening

or a grave,

my waking

is both

arrival and departure.

My bed should

have it’s own

inscription:

"May I 

Rest 

in 

Peace"

Awake

I work to make

my life what it is;

to control the narrative,

to deserve my fate.

But the dreams

just happen

absent

of any conscious

expediency.

Maybe my morning

ritual of 

reconstitution is

a mistake.

Despite its canny

allusion to

 singularity,

any understanding

or lack thereof

is reached entirely 

through consensus...

a Greek chorus

of inner voices 

whose identities 

I thought

had long lost 

their hold

over me,

again

attempt their

cathartic coup.

Don’t crowd out

the little boy who

exists solely by feeling

pushing past their

billowing robes

and struggling

to be heard.

He will only be

left to

imaginary devices.

Meanwhile

the un-darling skeptic

sits staring

into space

sucking the teat

of his glasses

awaiting any chance

for contradiction.

Lurking behind him

the infamous

inner father;

an influence

acquired from nothing,

(being that

I had no father

and have no child).

Still, his voice

manages it's manly,

yet gentle instruction.

His missive:

overlook what

you think you know 

of other soldiers.

You are

your own

civil war.

My sleep 

is a sly intervention

absent of which I

might well

know everything

all at once.

Given to dreaming,

I've taken to counting

the hours between

my every

joy and sorrow.

Sometimes I see

my soul a cave

of shadows

whose echoes

are dreaming me

into a man

as unnaturally as a bird

attempting to fly.

It takes wings

to dream 

with such

a muscularity.

Yet without sleep

I'd grow sentimental,

and possibly

cruel.

What I've learned

(the take away)

is that

no dream's mirror 

can hold me,

being merely

the quicksilver version

of a ruin;

the battlefield

but not the war.

It's very incivility,

evidence

of no defeat.

And so

again

I return from

the front

struggling to retain

 this brutal information;

sole souvenir

of the unknowable.

Peter Valentyne

September 19 2019

The Subversive Beauty

of All We Deem Weird

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems

 to the absurdity of not-writing poems.”

                              ~Wistawa Szymborska

I like things that are weird.
Weirdness always throws me
 back on myself, forcing me
 to take ownership
of my perceptions.

I like a weird movie. I can’t lie.

Give me a dream sequence

any day.

Bring on the blurry transition shot

slowly revealing the protagonist’s past;
both borrowed and oddly my own.

The curtain of painted eyes

being cut with giant scissors 

in “Spellbound”.

The piano with a thousand keys.

That clock with the wilting hands.

Weird always gets my attention. 

It draws me in.

A fetish is weird.

A hundred pairs of shoes

all neat in their boxes, and the owner

on a pair of bedazzled crutches.

The stepsister who sliced

off her heel in hopes of marrying the prince.

A sexually stimulating stink.
A sweater knit for a tree.

Voodoo dancers entertaining
at a children's party.

That dress made of meat.

I love nothing more than

a crooked door.

Any optical illusion

that morphs into something obscene.

The unsettling sensation
of being in the vice grip
a dog passionately
dry humping your leg.
What could feel more weird
than that?
I like not knowing
what something is.
What is that?

I like things that shock.

I like the surreal.

An apartment so absurdly cluttered

there’s nowhere to sit or walk,
or sleep. There's no bed!

I like art where I least expect it.

A hideous painting

cherished without an ounce of irony. 

I like an animal in a baby carriage

dressed up like Shirley Temple.
Fake flowers at a funeral.

If it’s weird, it’s worthwhile.

But not weird for weirdness sake.

I like weird when its not put on;

sincere, passionate, utterly misguided

weirdness that tips

the mind towards delinquency,

unexpectedly revealing

the hitherto unforeseen truth

that even angels
need to use the bathroom.

I like what’s not allowed or acceptable

as long as it does no harm.

A sudden wet drip or spatter 

onto your face out of nowhere
(and it isn't raining!).

A person perusing a porno 

on a tiny t.v.
in the middle of the woods.

A hot pink living room.

That unbelievably giant stool

clogging the toilet
in the latraine at summer camp.

The way I used to pretend to fall

down the stairs when my parents

threw cocktail parties,
 or that old chestnut:
playing dead by the side of the road

Weirdness is akin to beauty
as it is always
in the eyes
of the one who
it beholds.

Peter Valentyne

September 8th, 2019

Dissolution

I align myself with the morning,

where everything is possible.

My dissolution always arrives

at night where nakedness 

assumes another meaning.

For the most part, nights

are for suffering indignations.

Stripped of my philosophy, 

equations and ephemera,

I am always prodigal.

I think of dreams

as photographic negatives;

what transpires arrives 

always after the fact,

 pushed out by the antibody

of my inner light.

Messages arrive via acquiescence

so that impressions

are merely remnants

felt through loss. 

Perhaps that’s why

afterwards, I am

pure amnesia.

I have lost touch with my misery.

Not because I’ve been spared,

not because my suffering 

has bred resilience,

but because during the day

I maintain an imaginary center

that holds both worlds 

in the same space. 

My foolishness has it’s own integrity.

For most, sticking to their story

is all they know how to do,

as if identity were a defiantly creative act

in service of a fallacious sense of certainty.

For me, I develop prints.

Consider the saddest person imaginable;

everything they love beyond their reach.

I assure you

there is still the possibility

for utter happiness.

Something beautiful happens when you die;

all your fears take leave, lift. 

Burdens dissolve, 

and it becomes possible

to discover every judgement 

you ever made

was borne from misunderstanding.

The very life you fashioned;

a sin of un-individuated vanity.

What right had we

to compare ourselves to each other?

And so for me,

things fall apart at night

so that I can be whole.

All is lost, yet you have agency.

You’ve woken.

Now how will you live?

Peter Valentyne

September 6th, 2019

Man Smells

by

Peter Valentyne

I hopped on the M11 this morning right into a blind man’s snuff box. After finding a single seat on the sunnier side, I did what most mass transit riding somnambulists do and pulled out my phone and began scrolling through my morning emails; Old Navy Card Member Exclusive: $5 leggings, Mayfair Carpet Tiles Labor Day Clearance, Grubhub Up to 35% Off local Restaurants, Facebook: Chocolate Waters added a new post…When someone I’d not seen got on and passed me in the aisle smelling like beauty personified. “Wow! What was that scent?”, my whole body enthused. I fear I began to visibly sniff, (my inhaling a mini-inquisition of it’s own), as my mind rifled through it’s catalogue of cross-pollinated odors. Unsure if the perpetrator had been a man or a woman, I was free to imagine myself traversing the city in a similarly splendiferous alchemical cloud. If whoever they were were still on the bus at 82nd street, I was determined to follow my nose straight to the source and ask the bearer whatever was that intoxicating (cliche I know) perfume or cologne they were wearing. One could imagine that this was what angel wings betrothed to faint cedar and fresh gardenia blossoms must smell like, a scent that could recalibrate the soul and reinvigorate the weariest spirit. As I was contemplating my somewhat gutsy scenario of identification, other smells began to intrude. Across from me on the left, taking up 2 seats was a disheveled worn-looking man who had just unwrapped a meat sandwich from it’s silver sleeve and released from it’s clammy cave an aggressive stink of wet dog and greasy onions that blared through the body of the bus and assaulted my nose as if my entire face had been shoved against a dirty dog’s damp rear end. “How can he eat that?” I quietly beseeched, as though I might actually become vicariously ill via an obnoxious airborne stench. Think second-hand smoke! Do smells carry germs on their tiny invisible backs like atomic particles? I thought of changing seats as I subtly sniffed my shirt to see if the stink had begun to permeate the fabric. Where had my angelic gardenia and cedar smell gone? It was being drowned out by this filthy little man deigning to eat his revoltingly greasy breakfast mystery-meat-on-a-stale-roll-from-some-squalid-Greek-deli sandwich. I tried not to picture him pulling it from his crotch or having had it tucked beneath his sweaty armpit before climbing aboard the M11 to contaminate us all. Suddenly I couldn’t escape the greater reality that my nose had over-thrown the hierarchy of my perceptions, usurping it’s precedence in the pecking order of my body’s own multi-sensory GPS.

That’s when I left my body and began to smell each passenger without leaving my seat. It was like flying in a dream, only I was traveling simply by steering via the snaking stream of my mindful inhalation. I found I could easily go north, south, east, and west by simply following each recognition that flooded my nostrils. I could tell what my nose was looking at without benefit of any actual image before my eyes. There was the twenty six year old male hustler with poppers in the pocket of his Wrangler brand faded blue jeans, a cold cologne diluted by sweat, he just having smoked his third cigarette before boarding, a faint salty, last night’s gizz smell that was barely a yellow shadow on his T. 

The Chinese lady with the little girl who’d obviously come from the dry cleaners and was letting the girl chew on a piece of cheap chocolate to keep her from humming. The lady had chop suey on her breath and a mothball odor emanating from her cotton knit handbag which was a hand-me-down from her dead mother. She had just that morning painted her daughter’s toe nails with a dime-store quality lacquer. Pink, I think.

The elderly couple towards the back of the bus that smelled exactly the same, both sharing that unmistakable “old man” smell. He had a prevalent denture odor and she had on a sweater that had the faintest scent of rose perfume. On further inspection, the old man’s socks were the chief culprit of the fetid aroma that practically drowned out his wife’s own floral capitulation. 

I decided to turn my nose on myself. What evidence existed totally out in the open that would reveal my own present journey? Before I could self-examine to see what I might ascertain purely with my nose…I smelled the sadness of a 63 year old man.

September 2nd, 2019

The Shadows 

of Things Unseen

The night arrives
always in reverse,

and with it 

dreams 

like undeveloped negatives

in a space reserved for shadows.

These shadows 

relive our lives

in spite of any

lack of light.

In fact,

they need our light

to remember their purpose.

Otherwise they go on

despite us, without consent,

without consideration,

autistic phantoms

with no sense of scale

or discretion.

They’ve no qualms 

in dragging us by the hair

into danger,

into embarrassments,

into shame, into longing…

They never think twice.

They always come 

after the facts;

facts they won’t hesitate 

to use against you.

Can you understand me

if I say your light source

both casts them out

as deftly as
it brings them down,

their vividness

in proportion to

your own luminosity.

But here’s the catch:

Your joy is their misery

and vice versa. Why?

Because intensity

and contrast

is how they 

take their measure.

They view us as perpetrators

because we so often 

are trying to un-live them.

Dreams are their way

of getting even.

In their neck of the woods

your name 

has no power

to describe you.

You cannot ignore 

their existence

and get away with it.

You may not even be aware

or remember how your life

is nightly being appropriated.

The only thing you can do

is wake up, 

but your waking

is hardly an end

 to their dominion.

They find their way 

back to you

as they live in 

perpetual disregard.

They don’t need your

acknowledgement,

let alone your approval.

Your helplessness 

enables their control.

Your unconsciousness is their Globe,

a stage to enact 

their occasionally

degrading dramas.

You are their hostage,

as are your friends and family.

They always enter 

by doubling back.

They push you out 

into a full fledged production,

with no lines, no costume,

not even a proper contract.

They have their way with you

without the slightest consideration

as you are 

their unlikely star.

Despite this, your fame 

doesn't go to your head

because there is never

an audience

to approve or disapprove

of the production

unless they’re 

meant to be

part of the play.

Tonight, you find yourself

making love to the enemy

for secret documents

despite the fact that

no information can save you.

Anything without 

emotional resonance 

is considered detritus.

Only so much muck.

Did I say that

belongings have no agency

unless they’ve been
designated as props?

Your wardrobe is often your own

and only meaningful in so far

as it reveals your vanity.

If every night is the lifespan

of their last day,

then ask yourself:

Who are they?

Peter Valentyne

September 1st, 2019