Preface: on the voice of these poems. She, Liberty, said Ghosts Stepping on their own Eggshells. Liberty as a Luxurious Thorn of the Future Content. Sirens Pixelated Chrysalis of the Absolute. Siren, a Slumbering Rainbow of Wreckage. Liberty Drunk-Dialing Delicate Men. Liberty Thrown Down by the Angel of Orgasms. Cold Lake of Forgetfulness Exalts the Siren. Of course we as a people abhorred her prettiness, like a thorny music sometimes disliked in fanfares for the uncommon woman, sneered at it so, scoffed at her, had so since the beginning, and said as much of our positions, but had also, like most — nay all — fallen victim to her wiles.
We as a people, sexist, misogynistic, hated her on those days when the party duped was our own suckered fascinations; in fact perhaps the only reason we began hating her at all was those first deceitful days and then the sobering days subsequent where we took wind that the sting was on.
But we hated her and her prettiness most those days we watched others fall for it, hoodwinked, blinded by her diaphanous veils of phony charm. Hatred boiled. Righteousness festered into a carbuncle of all that she and her prettiness were not: a goiter swelling from the neck of the Just, and Lo, those the days we wanted to punch her square in her small, angular, perfectly symmetrical nose in anger.
It did, often. But Liberty herself was astonishingly stupid; she held no truth, other than her own innate vapidity, and could barely have declared that much or made herself known to reality in any authentic way, in other words: falter. That was the tricky part. Her guile and wiliness were part her ammo.
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She was pretty. Pretty this, and pretty that. But what she lacked, dear friends, what she had none whatsoever of, was soul. Her wisdom was not her own. Her parents were never advised to send her to a therapist when she was a child, unless in those circumstances where she grew up in an area of wealth and trophy-wifery where what the rich gave to their children in terms of character-building was their own disregard and self-involved and unfortunate series of divorces, the norm.
