Time is Always the Crossroad

in 15 days my brother dies again, time is illusory

disasters shape language, once we were water line 

now we are abandon of a season that shapes our survive

in 15 days, the city will be lost of traditions that float us shore

to shore, we who thrive in the chaos of undone for each day numbered

a costume, a song, the way we arrive at the river in droves and will 

you play for me, will you dance with me, have you ever hungered so much 

in your life for a city as i have hungered for her to be reborn, repeatedly

in 15 days we take the shape of mourning, i don’t know everything suicide 

can do yet, i don’t know everything loss can be, i don’t know if holding ‘

together is a possibility, but here we go out on this lonely flight of what else 

can we drop into those waters, palms painted morning light & for every death, 

some life clings to us, or else we would have to admit we can’t see 

at all. Can we admit it? Can we convince grief that timing matters, or is it true 

every song cannot be unsung, so deep in the threading, is the walk we take at dawn

from the house to the river, and my brother will be there walking from our mother’s house 

to our father’s where he will get the gun, will you lay me down to sleep, for every walking 

wake we keep, i am never alone now. Ever i am with you in time, we travel doubly bound 

find me near the shore on the morning of no Mardi Gras and i will show you how it looks  

to carry all of it, angel of break, to poet is to never heal completely, for i would hold 

until there is no shape, till the burns of time erase, the flood inside me sharp with learning 

in 15 days, ask me what it means to crossroad these deepest pains, for that too we sing. 

Have you ever seen what water can erase?

Day 10:

Activate Survival Instinct:

make believe and beliefs are the same, a desire for things to remain the same

do you believe you have to carry this forever?

once upon a time i was spooling out a story i’ve held threaded inside my cells for fifteen years. come closer…

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

Process Notes: 

Photograph: 

Seabrook Bridge that connects New Orleans East to New Orleans, taken through the damaged window of my brother's car

The Seabrook Bridge (officially the Senator Ted Hickey Bridge) is a medium-rise twin bascule, four-lane roadway bridge in New Orleans, Louisiana, carrying Lakeshore Drive, connecting Leon C. Simon Drive on the upper side of the bridge with Hayne Boulevard on the lower side. The bridge is operated by the Orleans Levee District. It normally stays in the down position for vehicular traffic, but provides sufficient clearance for most marine traffic.
Source: Wikipedia 

My brother was eight years younger than me. He suicided right before his 29th birthday. I doubt he had many memories of New Orleans east. I remember driving over the Seabrook bridge almost every day of my childhood. I used to dream the drawbridge would open up beneath us, and we would tumble in or sometimes the bridge was an extraordinary height and the car would have to nose dive down the other side. I can't remember in the dreams if I was leaving or returning home, or which side of New Orleans is even home anymore. Bridges connect and divide, like language, and that is why I cannot escape them. 

I've been driving my brother's car since he died. Six years now.

It has a problem with volume. It has glass that won't stay in place. The smear on the passenger side window is from when my brother got his tint too dark and then he couldn't get a brake tag. My mom helped him peel it off with a razor blade. How do you get rid of memory. How do you remove these reminders from your every day view and then walk around being what. 

I would have to confess to you that inside the disaster of Katrina was the opportunity I had to live with my mom and my brother again when we evacuated. I would have to confess, who ever gets a second chance at childhood. It must be all miracles because there is no way I can tell you what is and isn't. There is no way I can ever say what should or should not be. I know it takes a long time to see truth. It took 9 years for this to be true, and took another 3 years for it to surface. Gratitude is where grief intersects with time. Live long enough and it will all come down to what we took for granted in the moment. Take nothing for granted and it will all come down to time.

12 years from now, what will you hold from the pandemic and say, thank you   how will you break down on the bathroom floor sobbing, oh my god, oh my god what i wouldn't give to go back....

Mark me here: You do not get to return to disasters. 

"...brain wave patterns could explain why so many traumatized people have trouble learning from experience and fully engaging in their daily lives. Their brains are not organized to pay careful attention to what is going on in the present moment." 

-The Body Keeps the Score

Notes from the Fold: 

(Written in 2006 in New Orleans)

Suggested Ways of Living In New Orleans:

1. Medicate (i.e. Prozac, Zoloft, Xyprexa, Trazadone, Wellbutrin, Valium, Xanax).
2. Medicate (i.e. alcohol, weed, coke, ecstasy, mushrooms, acid, or various pill combinations crushed with a quarter and snorted with a dollar bill).
3. Sleep, or at least lie in bed with a pillow over your head. It’s okay, new polls show 1 in 3 New Orleanians cannot fall asleep. At least you’re not alone.
4. Distract, by any means necessary (see numbers 1 and 2).
5. Exercise: heavy lifting, carpentry and painting count.
6. Go about as though debris and half gutted homes were the norm.
7. Cut pictures of politicians out and throw darts or do other disgraceful things to them.
8. Take a vacation, preferably to another country.
9. Read letters from loved ones, if all your personal belongings and loved ones were lost in the storm, read your FEMA disaster recovery fact sheet, then apply for a SBA loan and the Road Home Program. This will be long and tedious, certainly keeping you distracted for some time. When finished immediately go back to steps 1 and 2.
10. Go to the hospital (see number 8) in another state where they actually have operating hospitals, just to see how the rest of the world lives.
11. Write your congressmen, your representative, your insurance company, the Corps, etc…..see step 9.
12. Rest, sit and think. Nothing’s happening fast, so there’s nothing you’re gonna miss.
13. Listen to sad music, When the levees break, Zeppelin cover.
14. Listen to happy music, Greenday and U2’s The Saints are Coming.
15. Get angry.
16. Do something nice for someone else like coming to a full stop at the intersection with no working lights or letting your neighbor borrow your utility pole for some juice for their microwave oven.
17. Eat ice cream, candy, cookies, cake, or brown sugar out of the box
18. Go to the shopping mall where you can see a miniature display of New Orleans in ruins. Never mind, scratch that one. Stay home and knit.
19. Watch TV or play video games (see number 4).
20. Cry, if this is difficult for you, just watch the evening news or pick up a copy of the latest USA today.
21. Talk on the phone if you can, about things not New Orleans related, To achieve this, stop talking to anyone from outside New Orleans.
22. Go to therapy if you can get an appointment at one of the two working hospitals or three private practice doctors left.
23. Meditate.
24. Talk to your partner.
25. Don’t talk to your partner, at all. Just be glad your partner hasn’t cut you up and left you on the stove.
26. Have sex, but under no circumstances are you to conceive and bring more people into the misery.
27. Drink tea, preferably in London.
28. Take a bath, that is if your gas has been turned on.
29. Watch a sad movie (see number 20) When the Levees Broke by Spike Lee.
30. Watch a happy movie (see number 15) The Death of a President by Newsmarket Films.
31. Lie on the floor (try the bathroom, that always seems to work) unless the bathroom still doesn’t have a floor, then try balancing across the cross beams while enjoying the underbelly view of your former home.
32. Take a drive with no destination, preferably off a long bridge.


Resource:
The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the University of New Orleans organized the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) in 2005 in partnership with many national and Gulf Coast area organizations and individuals.
http://hurricanearchive.org/

You can't wipe your tears

"Live Art"

"Losing control is the worst thing that can happen."

"I never saw a host of angels mowing down my lawn. I don't even have a lawn. 

It just seems like I do sometimes." 

-Laurie Anderson

"Live Art" 

an angel will destroy you. 

and call it love because that's all it knows. 

an angel fits into a glove

an angel fits into a shoe

the voice inside me sd: i am older than love 

    what you seek at the end of the great tap root, always hungry, love concepts

sieves the heart, who wrote its coding, & i am. 

                    assigned a task. a mapping, could fold wings down 

travel so deep. you will keep: 

  what is older than love, i was designed to get close enough to call back

inside sound. 

aware & unaware of the plurality. 

                    i was not pretending

madness. i was not performing 

        (of course, i was performing) i went intothecracks

in thru the breaking, you have to mine: light meets light in the darkness 

to say i was a poem, & so fly 

dissociated inside the puzzle, you can solve a maze from above

watch me 

because she could not rewrite 

            the entire story, i wanted to throw

                                                                 it all away 

 i was so ashamed of my mind 

     i was so in love  (terrible&brilliant) i... i was trying 

to not be infection:  (you can't talk to the echthroi that long, tell her) 

they say angels are notorious liars. 

it's when i can't feel the words i am saying: language plummets

it all hits the same

inside the dreaming of can we survive

& i did not: i watched her die

i saw them bury her

 i stretched out that last breath into 6 years so thin i could see: make me believe 

              be a door. transit a sacrifice you can't touch here. 

do you exist when i close my eyes. i call out in the dreaming & i'll come, he says. 

the point is: you made something beautiful. hold on. 

 you made something beautiful - tell me how you could lose a miracle

the best thing i ever did in my life was i built a net

i knew i wasn't safe alone. so i built a net of people 

                                 who could choose to hold this. 

 there is nothing easy about holding a person 

              don't kid yourself: there is nothing easy about holding a person 

if a person is easy to hold, then question why your hands are so light. 

for we get away with secrets, for we lie & lie 

but none of us get out just being "easy" 

i would never trade madness for easy, i would never trade 

being touched for happy, 

in the sound experiment of being human: I watched you all 

make yourself small for love. 

i do it too. we think maybe no one will notice, i don' t belong here. 

            where love would have bloomed, i addict control. and the flow

  

was sound, i was that wilderness, what draws and repels

the cannot tame. somehow i created the perfect life: 

no one can touch me, the bargain i made to stay safe. 

an angel will destroy you. 

and call it love because it’s all there is.

Dear Sylvia

Dear Sylvia,

i read your life so carefully

i tried to navigate the death drive

tried to squeeze love from what was not love

& survived, the stop point of my life

i came so close i could taste it, licked the echo

chamber where dying was desire’s great wing

it has only been my mind i have been afraid of

here in this place of: the great stones stacked

so we room & who owns us now

to say i have tombed in the maw of surrender

a stacking of bee wings collated to glisten

under dew, the harping of sound we caught breeze

whispers so true, my heart leaped, and i am

i am unaware of how to travel

forward in time any longer

when coiled to the back of me remainders

once i was ordinary, oh a woman hollows

you told me to sing until my voice hoarsed

under a gritting & the world now it is

none of us can pretend, every stain

doom mark, more terrifying, we spell

till love’s shadow creeps upon the ledge

where we still, where we teeter, i had thought

to throw this life away

i had thought: all night it seems natural

and the blades tumbled into my tongue

lilacs of shame color the dreaming, and the stars

sway slightly in the breeze of never was

& that is the gift, i was given

by sibling, to be amid the hectic fire

and to not be the one who burns

[redacted] is my l_v_ language

i mask so fine the brittle hinges

the hand that sweeps it letters and the voice says to me

a window opens, i forget time moves               i'm writing just to you

tell me i'm not insane. i think about a day & realize i am hardly

i was wearing this mask all the time          for you

i'd cease to live but there's the pain, i'd have to hand it all to you

i think maybe you feel the same

instead we write these routes to clues

tell me you understand the song: under every gesture i was wrong

                   [don't say this part out loud]

i must be in love with suicide because it's all i think about

           be in love with suicide               it's all i think about


                in love         suicide               it's all i think


                    love         suicide                          i think


                    [EXIT]


to pull her up to speak [we must]  be that sick, we must be that sick
tell me how you border the safety of a mind always at work to undo
so you talk to me about love,


                   she doesn't exist her[e]      i couldn't feel     i t    anyway


and now you couldn't hear me too

      there was nothing i could write that would ever reach into you




 

Frozen States

Frozen States

how'd you get so desperate/ how'd you stay alive -C. Love 

woke up with a fist in my throat
scrape rage but thinned time, it fast
lingers, i lost the grip, my tongue
a grotto
     of bartering, you want this life, you want this life
 ask anyone passing by, what a joke, what an eternal mourning
          take pills to feel the only love that touches

     [redacted]  came up                        [what i am owed]

     & don't think we haven't recorded
     
 how am i still here                how am i still here
         
          was the refrain from under:: it was stardust they pulled
     out my mouth,   i was frost bit, no one wants to photograph
          a girl who can't [pose]         she's not doll      [en__gh]

    you'll never be able to hold that g a z e 

        every one knows if you can't be beautiful & you can't
          [ be horrific ]       horror show this waste
 of living            it wears your face

      4 seconds:: i was touch-down, deep stasis::
      & when i came back             [redacted]

some parts never will, i couldn't get warm,
they piled the blankets around me, a smothering
& i sd: the dead take up space inside
   [no one listens to hysterics]    don't say it's up to me 

            i was hyperthermic      dead zone  where i traveled

            b/c i knew i could          i can do anything         [out there]  

           it's nothing. i keep saying angel, what i mean is terror. no 

           one is listening to me. i keep saying words & they say she's a poem

          what a beauty. what a trilling. death hung on my hands and feet

          i was so numb. there is nothing out there. & it is cold. the light of light
   
          darkens. bone shivered      there is no way for sound to carry. so quick

the silence is us. so quick.

  the truth is this:

     no one will ever reach for you

      not like a dreaming, a place you cannot shore
      when you island loss
         creep from death parent to lesser cues

every poem was a mirror i held up

             

                & i wait               i'm afraid it won't lead me anywhere

                 
                 we call her       [             ]   kneel into the frozen lights 

                 useless as a song, useless as a memory, useless as __________
                 how could i still be here.... when every code i wrote was the same

i am lost & the maps, torn to shreds. the way
home insides me, i would go there now
but the children sweetly gather, the dog snores
the sun rises in the city i have only ever known
look at me, i have failed at everything.

     i have failed at everything.

     i ever wanted in this life           no matter for the cold here is nothing

     the cold out there.           endless. is what waits.

 



     
     


       

                       
             

Suicidal Ideation Scale

once upon a time...    prior to language

i flew the skies, shed skins, i was walk of two worlds 

label bottle bone: "sick"          i swallow it under my tongue 

lifetime shatter: the myth of you will not want to die one day...

one day, you will not want to die 

            //it might be a collection of hours but grasp//

let us ask you about harm: here a scale of reduction &
the trespass of truth is i will turn you over to policing
tick... tock... you be glued into time better, girl 

- Mental illness (suicide reflects mental illness);

- Cry for help (suicide threats are not real, they represent a cry for help);

-Right to die (people have the right to take their own lives);

-Religion (lack of religion has a role in suicide);

-Impulsivity (deliberate self-harm and suicide are impulsive acts) ;

-Normality (everyone is potentially capable of suicide);

-Aggression (suicide is an aggressive act), and Moral evil (suicide is a morally bad action)

what will it say of poetry

a failure to give.... but consider it led me further out 

than i ever anticipated. 

in the first year after my brother suicided, i thought 

this wave, this calm, my heart, this blown through i have touched

with my blood, what a feeding, what a strapped down to knowing
cart me  i surrender. 

        but they find you anyway.       oh that song, inside your cells

  couldn't hide that shine.      that kind of burning calls        

    the ferocity of what cores            no one can see 

The CCCS-18 consists of items that measure respondents’ beliefs about legitimacy of suicide (as a rationally acceptable act), acceptability of suicide in terminal patients, morality of suicide from a social perspective and suicide itself as a solution to exit from a given situation

(everyone is potentially capable of suicide (can you hold it like a love( 

(a solution to exit from a given situation    (can you hold it( 

(suicide are impulsive acts (love itself(coming here itself(every time i jumped 

This scale consists of hypothetical scenarios in which the scheme’s main character experiences a problem and attempts suicide. The scale wants respondents to determine the extent to which they have sympathy or empathy with the character and agree with his/her decision in attempting suicide.

do you agree with my decision to attempt suicide(what is acceptance 

do you agree with my decision to ideate suicide (what is surrender

do you agree to put down your fear (there is nothing to be afraid of 

          death is ending a story

& all story tellers

hold the light 

This questionnaire asks about attitude and opinions toward self-destructive behavior, including thoughts about circumstances under which someone might attempt or commit suicide. 

a poem is anatomy, to say i anatomize the self

have taxidermied the constructs you apply to situations

and i am asking you to undo all attachment.                   

       

                               that is all.    i am asking, 

     can you give up the idea of life   

 what is the act of continuation

but a type of destruction of allowing an end

to occur spontaneously

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

   

New Dollbaby Piece up at Jacket2: EXTREME TEXTS

From:

 Extreme texts

Edited by Divya Victor

Dollbaby

The poetics of hysteria and motherhood

MEGAN BURNS

Trigger warning: abuse, suicide

The following document is an archive of two years of my life when I lost custody of my children after I tried to end an abusive marriage. The court took my kids from me based on the art I create: appropriately, the art in this case centers around historical instances when real women also lost their voices, autonomy, and their lives due to their own inability to have freedom and safety in this world. It’s 2019, and women are still not safe. I want to send the song of this text into the future until the answer is sure: when are women going to be safe in this world?

Read full piece at Jacket2:

http://jacket2.org/poems/dollbaby

DOLLBABY: Hysteric

--------------------------------------------------------TW--------------------------------------------------------



ANATOMY OF A DOLLBABY:: [Category of Display, Madness in the Physical Form of this Female Body under excavation of language] or is this real life.

explicate the construction of the doll

each doll is a book of existence

                                   a piece of hysteria

drawing a familiar  -- linear digression 

connecting us all into one

dear love,

i am losing my mind. it's not alarming yet. here i am still in your sight lines, in this shatter. i am listening to the voices in my head like i never have before. i was always afraid of what they would have me remember. what they would speak of and to speak of it until eternity, we cannot ever erase what happens to us.

all dolls are the same dolls

dear seraph,

you run a code along a line, a sound, you follow the exact path you create by sounds you pay attention to --it's not a telling or a retelling, it's a channel. to open new paths in your mind. a virus cracks it open. an angel is a virus speaking inside your mind. what are you to me. you mirror. watch the way a program runs you.

Construction of the performance: 

what is the poetics of what happens in a bed. what is a hysteric performance. how does the plaything allow for narrative to structure.

you look just like a dolly

can you make safe happen
it's not a wound/ it's a door

 i need you to see me clearly/ this side of sane/ i need you to see me before sound tears it apart/ the last bits of what makes it a story of her/ she disappears / that’s what happens/ she disappears/ know that it’s a choice/ like suicide/ but instead of erasing the body/ i’m erasing identity/ attachment to self/ made up of sanity/ made up of the structure of sound

a poem can be a spell that slips veils. i saw them last night, by candlelight and so you can tell me i'm mad but i know what i see. i know what i am. made by what you would have me be to carve a path to i will heal this damage if it kills me. i am dead and you make me want to be alive.

we want to be sung back into truth

i cut nelly loose after 5 years of being caught in the chair of secrets. who can keep you from holding a secret. why even a gun can't shoot me clear for years, dear brother. dear brother, how many of us die under the stars alone before we can scream. and so now i am the haunting of you.

a new voice enters {HER} the poet's mind :: beyond the angel. another who holds an ancient tongue.

we learned to forget who we are. we learned to never speak. to wade into the quiet of this is a house. this is a table. this is a morning. we are eating breakfast. tell me mother, why i have no memory of ever being a girl.

was  i born into this life not a child. but a plaything. a doll.

she has nothing but eyes to tell you what she’s thinking. but no one is looking.

no one sees her at all.

the doll will not admit what scares her.

show me on the doll where they broke into your programming.

show me on the doll where they broke into your programming.

show me on the doll. show me the doll. show me the doll.

we make everything better for her.

there's a reason the body remembers what we forget. 

there's a reason the mind knows what the body can't feel. 

there's a reason we take the doll from the chair and hold her mothering all we are. 

she can't close her eyes unless she's laying down. 

and we should lay down now brother, we should lay it all down for the world to see.