Solid as Wave

you've been nothing but bounded your whole lie, i mean life

to speak of it

i have fully embraced giving up 

boundaries risk nothing and are inevitable

everyone will bet on them

high praise slap on the back 

for wielding yours. but what an imaginary

what a way of concealing 

to think being human makes you 

so spectacular and not just spectacle

i'm not trying to craft poems here

i want a record of break, of fail, i want to insert 

into time the memory of how when you try 

to repeat, you are making a bargain with less

you can't go home again

but you also can't do any of this twice

do you understand what i am coding
you can't see clearly 

because our way of perceiving is being 

co-opted by what we consider acceptable 

ways to be in this level of program

and what we have allowed allows for no clear

management of the dream's taking 

so we barter and trespass and i want you 

to recall love is not a thing you can give 

or take, you have nothing and you get nothing 

dead or alive, we top the cascades of erase

you've been nothing but bounded your whole life.

the way we love one another is so particular

no word yet exists

what we call failure in this life is a lie, what we 

call success is a lie, what we call progress is a lie, what

we call history is a lie, what we are doing is actually 

nothing

What is the edge of sound?

Day 18: 

front doors standing open for blocks
the city at night divided between light and darkness
a neutral ground of garbage for miles
appliances wrapped in tape on corners
coffin flies and coffins on the tracks
cats in the square
the sound of screaming at night
quiet, a quiet deep in the bones
child bones found in the house
smell of the death
i kept dreaming till my brother died

**********************************************

Process Notes:

how the poem rhythms you like a lullaby
metaphor like a cave we dwell within
the volume of breaking
as you huddle and hide: silence
a type of shame, silence also a lesson
in naming, silence always a webbing
round which we keep

inside lies a great stack of i can, i can
i can

i can get it right

"I read the writing when he seized my throat."
-H. D.

Photograph:

Kenilworth Cinema in New Orleans East:

The Kenilworth Cinema was opened as a single screen by Ogden-Perry Theatres, Inc. on August 13, 1969. It was twinned in the mid-1970’s. Ogden-Perry divested itself of the theatre in 1982. It closed in 1991 due to problems with the roof.
Source: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/43362


We went to see Dick Tracy with Madonna in it, smoked cigarettes hiding behind the seats.  We were 12 or 13. In 1990, if you were a girl, you wanted to be an object. That was what was held out for you. The boys were pretty, pretty hair, pretty made up faces or the boys were hard, baggy clothes and fast cars and drugs. The boys were active voice. The boys were the center of every story. A girl at the center of a story still was eclipsed, still patterned against sexual passivity, still was a thing for the eye and tongue before the ear and mind. And mind you, we wanted to be seen that way. To be made visible is far superior to being invisible. To be possessed equals a claim to a type of safe.

Sometimes what helps you survive is not what keeps you safe. No boys were harmed in this telling. Water waits and this husky dream waits, and we wait to for truth to surface.

And language matters when you are trying to convince yourself of anything, but does it really matter how you survive.

In all these books of trauma, they don't ever tell you how much you can swallow unharmed. But I believe we must be coded early on to have a bandwidth widened by disaster.



"...even under the most perfect circumstances, there would always be something imperfect that would leave you feeling not exactly good. The trick was to get used to that feeling, or risk missing what little happiness there really was."
-R. Ford


"be stark in the world in which
all that heart breaking brightness will

crack"

RBD, draft 96 

Plague Journal:
6.7.20

Love is always worth doing.



Resource:

Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster
https://www.movingwalls.org/moving-walls/14/katrina-unnatural-disaster.html

Wanting to Die

and the love, whatever it was, an infection

i tried to last as long as you in the shatter
memory, a lip drooling, i have sliced
off more sounds than most

let me taste it, not rotten, a low
hung bruised fruit no one wants
palmed into violence, i have cut

my way out more than once, that song
sings inside my head constant, silence
is what takes the shape of love here and no

one touches, no one sees, till you disappear
and then let me tell you, bit by anger
planted inside you, i am one more line
written where you left, i emerge to surrender

excised from the deep tap root
you asked me to take in damage
say the woman was forty two and dear
how much time do we have left

put this blood angel up to my ear
we enter their star, they've all gone away
i whispered but you were gone too

anne, i will enter death a light
anne, fur and rings, it's lovely, tell me it's not lovely
how you will look and look for me
in ways you never tried when i was right here

where light meets light creates a darkness
and i like it more than i like me
i am unbalanced, to meet the bleeding trees
i've wiped the program

i am in torment and have no place here
i know your blades of glass, the shock
of sunsets, how i have loved you and all of life
is not up for discussion, it's how i could not

feel any of it, how numb can you swim
forever: how could love ask this of me
ashamed is the life i can't live

the way love will fall around you
riddled with the desire of it
and you falling, can’t grasp on to anything