Gay Guy in Seminary Day 109 (How Close is Too Close?)

We had our fourth poetry night today. Here is one of the pieces that I performed:

How Close Is Too Close?

Have you ever had a fly,

Actually fly into your eye?

Like, actually into your eye?

And before you realize it,

Your eyelids are closing around it like a Venus flytrap,

And it’s stuck in there,

Way too close for you to see it,

And it hurts!

And at first, you’re in denial about it,

Because, really, how often does a fly,

Actually fly into your eye?

And then you start to freak out because you think it might actually be moving around in there!

And, when you finally manage to get it out of your eye,

And you look at its tiny mangled body on the tip of your finger,

You realize,

You did that.

You caught a fly with your eye.

There’s a woman in Eastern Europe that will actually lick your eye for you.

She’s known throughout the region as a healer.

If you get something in your eye,

You can visit this woman,

And she will lick it out for you.

With her tongue!

She’ll brush her teeth first,

Gargle,

Rinse it out real good with water,

But after that she’ll get right up in there with her tongue,

And lick your eyeball!

And, I bet while she’s doing that,

You won’t really be able to see her tongue all that well.

She said that the strangest thing she’s ever licked out of someone’s eye was an apple peel.

So it was kind of like having a snack at the same time.

A wise person told me that you can’t figure out shape of the ocean by sitting on the beach,

But there’s something to be said for sitting on the beach,

Because books can’t tell you everything.

Because, when someone asks you about the beach,

You need to be able to tell them about the salty sea spray,

And you need to be able to tell them about the warm sand between your toes,

And the roaring thunder of the crashing waves,

And how sometimes at night,

At the right time of year,

When those waves crash,

They crash glowing green,

With bioluminescent algae,

And it’s the most magical thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life.

You need to be able to tell people about that.

But, the ocean is huge!

It’s enormous!

You need to be miles above it to even begin to get an idea of what it’s shaped like.

You need to be an astronaut!

But, that’s an awfully far way to go when all you really need to do, is grab a map.

There’s a scene from the movie Clueless,

Where one of the characters is commenting on how pretty one of the girls is,

And another character tells him that she’s a total Monet,

Like the paintings,

From far away she looks good,

But up close, she’s a big old mess.

But when you’re that close to something,

You’re part of the mess.

So, you need to remove yourself from that mess,

From that tangled weave,

You need to work the shuttle backwards,

So you’re looming cloth into thread,

So you can separate the strings of yourself,

From the strings of what you’re not,

Because you can’t see the pattern when you’re part of the pattern.

And, you can’t fix the problem when you’re part of the problem.

You can’t watch TV when you have your face pressed up to the TV screen,

Because all you’ll be able to see is a random assortment of Where’s Waldo pixels,

And none of them are going to be wearing that red and white striped shirt,

And there won’t be an answer key in the back of the book telling you how to live your life.

You need to move back far enough so that you can use your magic eye to find the 3-D image hidden inside the fractal design,

Because life is just a bunch of 3-D images,

We’re just usually too close to notice.