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Clothes on the Manichean

In our world of labels, fables, and lies, it’s not hard to find reasons for how we live wrong. Magazine ads scream the Manichean fads with photoshopped models more plastic than mannequins. But the fact that we call them models has more to it than merely throwing clothes on a person and freezing them in photograph. A model is a representation of what could be, not always what should be or what is. A model is something that highlights certain visual aspects but leaves out details that may come out in the final product; room for alteration, improvement, or mistake.

Models allow themselves to become a character, a stand in for an idea or a desire, though unlike the characters you find in novels and spoken hand-me-down myths, the model takes control of how people see them to a degree in which most onlookers only dream of. They are the sadhu and the sadvhi, the renunciates of excessive weight and ugly clothing. If you find a model, you find an ascetic dieting and abstaining in tight fitting leggings or next year’s fitted pin-striped suit coat.

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March of the Food Particles

even at a young age
the spoon was an airplane—
confusing as shit
as the news removed the simplicity
and it became larger than life
so you tried to avoid collision
with a closed mouth and shaking head

You had once swallowed a few
passenger string beans,
but when you realized what you were doing
you spit out the engine,
staining the hair of the hijacker
with army green vegetables,
mashed beyond identification

Imagine if you had jumped out of the high chair,
grabbed the alien aircraft from the hands of this
terrorist with chewed noodles spewed on their wrist,
your palm cupped underneath
to catch those who lost their grip
yelling “you’ll be fine, I’ve got you”
while they say in awe, “who’s got you?”
as you ran your little baby feet
with your sunset red spaghetti sauce stained bib
trailing in the wind (they had said you were
too young for spaghetti)
and your padded footie pajamas
(maybe navy blue)
that would keep your traction
across the slippery tile floor
while you looked for somewhere
to land them safely

They would look up at you
with thanks saying
“we give our bodies to you,”
and as you walked away they would trail you,
squirming on the floor behind,
pleading for you to put them in your mouth
and swallow them, your food followers,
crushed concoctions
calling to refrigerator reinforcements
‘til eggs rolled out like grenades on a battlefield
after your marching pudgy toddler legs,
cabinets opening as you passed them
spilling colorful Fruit Loop entrails
and cracked open cans of ravioli
in your path
until the land lay waste
as you watch them rot
out of their homes
and in your footsteps