Snow Moon

New Orleans is a shipwreck masquerading as a city

it hovers, horizon of worn time

i would lay down in fields of warm settings & if the moon

says i need you, cresting the rooftops of abandon 

where we travel to be able to breathe & below sea level still

high enough up & you can see the whole bend in the river

ghost barges stirring up February fog round the edges of their cut paths

call & response from the next roof over, we’re all out here leaving 

something behind, write my name on it for a lifetime, for this life 

folded into you, the way some of us get left out of the picture 

crosses the choice that some of us leave on our own if love

isn’t what you think it is: You’ll never be as free as when 

you let go of all you think you’ve learned here

asphalt shingles held us to a gripping, if you want to be inside me

under that full moon, we need to be high enough 

that i can see my city, the way i tied my life to her

the way i could come up under her, a rushing of water

is where my life spooled out, a rushing of wanting to feel everything 

there are types of desire that undo you, then there are types of wanting 

that carry you far enough to find them— some of us live in the interstices 

knowing all of this is temporary, steal what you can carry  

plunder the rest 

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. 

Carnal Evaluation

 Carnal/Eval/Uation 

I am about to make the other speak.

-Barthes

Nor did the war ever end, i could not stop the flow 

Bled out, i colored the right bright love of the red winged blackbird 

Best believe in the magic of— pier roped our separate water crafts

In calm waters and spent, smeared lipstick stains cloud shape 

On the interior of the mouth coverings, falling in space

Like love, garners a series of questions 

Participation in the others’ hallucination of you 

Line the poem with broken facts

Each heart a haunted place, be not what leaps if leaps 

Confused, fashioned as monsters of old 

Every tree trimmed with faces, a sadness 

Always remember the brokenness i tucked under 

This necessary keep: What is your allegiance to

To be an American poet, the response of the nation 

If you know what you are is better than what you want 

Space is negotiated by resources, the way the lines of the poem 

Take the place of where we would have been real to one another 

I think sometimes if you would just call my name out loud 

Like that story, the whole world could begin again 

Dropped of Desire

i'm going to take notes as we go under
as it capsizes
i'm going to small
in the terrible light of design
i'm centered on amaze
central to backing

there is a body in the building
is it recoverable
can you identify the design
of contamination, do you know how many
bodies were in the room prior to the diagnosis
of death: i am as statue. i am as prisoner.

i am attempt of constructed misjudgments
this song abrasive, undone of timing
i would sing for those forgotten

i was never going to be what you wanted
and that was hard for me to hold
i wanted to make it to the other shore
blessed of survive in how we held each otherdown

but here we are: adrift
i have to let you go 

i have to watch everything
i love
be taken by time

 

Do you feel love or do you think love?

Day 22

All photographers are liars. They want to convince you the young beauty is not a corpse, the sunset not a dying star, the bloom not already wilted, and yet the poem could be called a lie except sound undoes us, its vibration cannot be held to untruth the way a framing can be said to manipulate time, to capture, to hold still. A photograph is what we wish memory could be. No shutter fast enough to catch the nothing of light: A city can disappear, a country, a whole universe in a whisper. All we catch here is for release. Do you understand what we fish for with the hook of compassion.


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


Process Notes:

minute variations in any system when amplified lead to chaos-


I'm sorry but I can't let you go now.

If you've come this far, I am coding a new program. It's already happening.

I'm sorry but there is a way that seeing is belief, a way that the word transforms grief, the way I have put my body between you and the world, the way I have used this as reflection, as reciprocity.

There was never a poem.

There was only the spell of design to code a ritual to survive.

Just stick with me anyhow...

I don't know why it is true, but it is true.

I can shift the lines. Proximity is not in space and time, proximity to me is chaos and chaos is a choosing, so if you have chosen to arrive here. Well, there is not the choosing of you as much as the choosing I have done to get us here. And here we arrive, a wonder and a tasking.

I don't know the ending yet, but I know we have shaped time and distance across a city.

I have already seen it die and I have seen it come alive again. This is happening as we speak. This death is inside us, happening even now.

The question was never what will you do with your one wild and precious life, the question is always:

What will you do with your one wild and precious dying.


Photograph:

The Mississippi River and the other shore

"technostrategic language"

is language that attempts to reduce horror to digestible bits, often used in war

instead of "millions of dead" the words "collateral damage"

instead of humans, "targets"

instead of the lives now suffering, we have been reduced to "economic incentive"
to" stimulus relief," to "suffering economy"

even as we know: there is no economy that is suffering

[We're alone in the cave. 

Hold on to that. It's just us and the shadows on the wall.]

i see you invincible
i see you invulnerable
i am the poet and you can never turn my gaze
i will spell disaster
and worded, watch me unclock inside
the dark energy that holds us all
threaded and over lifetimes, if you come
i am calling      i abandon any connection to one
as we travel in plurality
unhook me                        un - hook - me

unhook your tongue


Plague Journal: 
8.3.20

if we cannot tolerate another's suffering, we suffer

do you recall how you ever begin loving anything?

the way water hugs the land, a touching

"For Kali is said to be mad..."
-D. Kingsly

no one is coming. sanity is what i am containing. no one is coming. 15 years of containment and no more.


Resource: 
Hurricane Katrina poem - Walidah Imarisha
https://youtu.be/DJgpkalWSKE

Velocity:: this life

be stark in the world in which

all that heart breaking brightness will

crack 

            -RBD, draft 96: Velocity

suicide is a nowhere land

the living wade

chest deep, arms below

the surface   numb & where are we?

down in a no-tell breath

grace awash hide back tongue murmur made save

not echo just tumbling this sad

this life     & here i go my love

barely cloaks me

tell me how to house grief

it won’t stay calm: faster than light

faster than the fall of night

I will come darkly

hold   this is a breach

I hold the line even when I forget how

a puppetry of living

this & this & this

shadow side here nothing holds

what a lie, what a beautiful casket of doubt

I go to language to field the darkness

come for me fast, what happens

alone, what happens in our heads

how I tremble at the door you left open

empty lot under night

there is that there & alone

once I was a type of double, siblinged

now this always  try to follow

empty house city of cruel forget

city of rebuilt permanent rot

you can do everything right, they say

but of course we don’t, we rarely break even

these are all just stories of how our lives went

Error: A Seasonal Poem on Breaking

“Error

 And its emotions.

 On the brink of error is a condition of fear.”

 -Anne Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most”

I.

sometimes an error occurs

because of the way the world is fed to us

like X-mas eve, putting together toys for 3 little dreamers

and you looked at me frustrated and called me a “slut”

& I sat in the space of that breaking

knowing how I wifed against a border of neglect

but you led a different life beyond the fencing of home

gingerbreaded, a snow dropping

if you say so, you can make believe

II.

as if a vow could be a way of altering

you double: live your life & write it out

it meters enough edge to trim the lies

III.

failure is just before you begin again

it precedes where you see how you

put yourself back together

I forgot the smell of you

I forgot the taste of you

I forgot any way home realizing survival

is how we maintained this artfulness

IV.

this essay of splinters

supple like causation

wide open, you watch for an all clear sign

the heart, safe for handling

to be hereditary to it is not a choice

that poem backs out, a deep spill

now too, I could not arrange the words

in better orders

V.

a half-finished sentence

I spent a lot of time saying

I love you as a way of warding

a parting

VI.

each little girl I see tears a fresh hole

in me, is this

what love is?

what is not quite

what is false that we can hold

what is made peace with a stalling

Carson says the language of the unsaid

is a two-way traffic

sometimes you travel both

VII.

he said, were you with you someone who made you

happy so little, and I stopped him

and said, I was with someone

who never made me happy

but these errors too

are a type of retelling

we don’t always have to be who we were

VIII.

I lost my life in you, not love

not nothing that was never there

a field where no one meets you

a lover is a smashing process where pieces

of you disintegrate

you don’t recognize disappearance for what it is

what do we mean by necessity?       not enough

is what we mean      not enough

a film burning where the sun

touched it