Kindness is a bargaining

Family Dinner

Kindness skirts the absolve, tender
love curtained, the way nice is handled
purpled in tones I could not remember
one day in the life of being so small
except windows, you look out empty

What is so real as the absence of sound?
the way I was gathered was wilder
taught we hold tongue tight
but affection is fluid, he says don't be
scared: Terror is a necessary fluid.

Only things temporary are precious.
where others built brick by brick, I found
my hands full of sand, grain by grain, each
numbered, look miracles, come in the way
you receive them. The back porch held us

in the summer, while New Orleans disappeared
we carved out too much dreaming and built this too
what we needed: And to be fed by love at every meal
what a life that would be: The blood jet is poetry.
Love is this desert: hot, dry, and endless.

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

RE: Survival

imagine we still spoke
& you asked me
what is the most terrible thing
that happened to you

and i turn, facing you
perhaps in bed
as the morning light filters through dusty slats
june below sea level in a city, listing to sink

here naked, covers strewn around our ankles
the a/c never stops humming
we barely touch, the heat of our skin
filling the emptiness

and i get lost in the deep swell
of your eyes upon me
to think in all of this chaos
you could see

the answer
i whisper into the palm
of your hand
                            "time"

REND

The wolf song is the sound of the rending you will suffer,

in itself a murdering.    – A. Carter, The Company of Wolves

Rend

for dean

i.

dropped spit

a beast desires most

violence contained

slaps the edge of coat here

bristling, says: “what am i”

says: “good girl”

says: “hold down”

i bend where i can’t translate

my body betrays

collar this dream

i am led

ii.

travel unmapped darkness

a veil drops

to skin

think of how we’ll escape

hung on the hook

called time

we coat the hours

i will inside you anyway

sing & dig in

teeth bared

iii.

carnage

terrible terrain

the animal of us attacked

to pin me under

to wipe your hand

down the mask

of memory

we built in temporary frames

a den of hungers

not asleep, not awake

but suspended

iv.

have you known

such heat as i have known

bite down enough

tremble each limb till

it lets go its safety

its fiction of

i was strong

against         sometimes

being left

is a gift

v.

don’t ask me to love

outside the poem

its safety net of syllables

dangling, i would open beneath

let it fall

let it fall apart

i lose the ability to be afraid

in measured doses

torn muzzle to trade instead

a sacrifice of shattered

points, light braided

to break    bloodied maw

call forth

BASIC {{SERA[p]H}} PROGRAMMING

LOAD 

let me know what i am 

when it all goes dark

NEXT

is that what love is

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. 

Dear Love

Dear Love,

-for Marcela Liniero Singleton, who sang me this tale of remember 

            what i have learned is much is confusion

            it’s easy to get lost

            you think you hold truth        like childhood

it’s slippery, & memory shifts: you travel back to sift

a collected narrative of the i am all i have survived and then some

            we run programs designed so smoothly we only catch it in glimpses, unbelieving      is that really how we make sense of the world

            let’s back to manifesting

            how from sound we emerged to make all of this, the great dream upon us

where we are all in the net

                        and the net is how we get free, the medicine in the poison

you think what will i sacrifice or you don’t consider & it’s taken anyway

            you put your hand in the mouth of a wolf & lose your hand

but what if you are the wolf

            and now you are in chains you cannot escape with a strange hand filling your mouth

                                    let me tell you how to drop it

let me read you what the magic sings for i’ve a spell you would name a love potion

it weaves nine times round the center where the serpent coils

in the root of what makes us—what stirs us, older than ancient

i would you remember to taste danger in the air

i would you remember to never let go the wilderness of things

do not be afraid of the dead

            we are them: do not be afraid of anything you find inside

it will tell you it will kill you but it lies: there is fear always but never when it’s happening which is to say unlike love that is always happening but you choose not to see –it’s a matter of gaze & what you are capable of holding

what do you practice every day.  what are you honing.  are you asking for things you spend no time handling.  

love is that winged beast who sits behind me & when the seraphim whispers, its truth rings—when they aren’t singing and they are always singing b/c it is in their nature to sing &

            let me turn this rune for you—read there what is in your nature, being human

it is in your nature to forget what you are   (that’s how often we come round) 

we make a practice of forgetting

dear love, why familiar

no one really believes in you

until they do, until they can hold it in their hands

but what of all the unseen gestures

all the codes of love flowing between us

practicing love is gratitude for all the small accumulated, unnoticed gestures

in our lives—it is an old story

so let me pull up this fire i carry inside my self

let me warm you by it so the sound of what i am saying roots deeply inside spreading

there is nothing outside love

it is the only program running

it is the only program running

& we are all so perfectly magical

we are all someone’s blood and someone’s story: why need you believe me in this chaos

you know truth when you hear it: no one has to tell you

don’t you: let me ask you, can you give and receive

can you see it for the oneness it is

let me ask you, can you practice hearing truth before that skill is lost in our bones

will someone have to die for you to wake           it’s ok

we don’t have to be afraid of what is asked of us

would you lay down your fears at the feet of the wolf

watch me slip these old chains, watch me swallow these dark dreams: everywhere

out of slumber we tumble

i see you and mark you well. i have carried your scent in my pelt for all of time.

you can come for me for i know what i am. now i am this vessel. now i sing & next

we find ourselves destroyer of worlds.  what one doesn’t do for love or what one does for love : a boon of no matter

you choose to see or you choose to stumble in darkness: what does not change is the terrain

i forgive everything. i forgive it all to the depth of what i am. & run program

tell me how the light here is dreadful

but nonetheless we carry on

Megan Burns

2.14.19