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