in possibility
what might a whole
faith
sound?
with her heartmind
with her souled body
in denial of dictates
by keepers of orders
to wrench by flawed reason
mind from herself
being from womb
also her
how would her chorus
shiver grace back
to her flesh
light back to word
mystery returned
to these folds
within her
on being embodied
it is not enough
to tell you i think
by way of begging
some acknowledgement
of being for doing this
would mean sidling up
to Descartes who despite
apparent cognitive prowess
managed to decide it was
appropriate to electrocute
dogs who he thought did
not think enough to feel
maybe it was their eyes
the naked love of them
that scared him into
such denial &
despite my best efforts
toward intelligence i tend
to love like a dog
prone to run
with sweet baby Jane’s
moonlit bodies stomping
muddy prints in the surf
at the shore in the light
of the moon
that excess
our all
at the killing hour
and yet
I know you are a stranger here, too, so by the light of you I become friend.
Come, friend. We have places to go.
They are dark now, until we arrive.
We may not travel at the speed of light, but this love is a shining thing.
What if now is time to bring it out?
I have no answers, only this slow form.
Take it now and let us go.
of bodies in translation
It appears that the what of it all
such as it is, happens between
ordered chains of causalities
& wild storms of infinite chance
so if then i should glimpse & dare
some address, will it matter? where
are you going and where have you
been? & i wonder what other
questions hide behind the veil
of this one, a bawdy elegy for
some lost relic, now lucid,
now dense, entombed
where root whispers to
root then sings to leaf
amid reaching of singular
dendrites across impossible
gulfs, where i am made
of volatile stuff between
ice and liquid, you may
find me
in the melt between lake
and cloud where i must be
the flying off.
uncertain orbit
Given enough practice, a body
will adapt to almost anything.
What follows adaptation are
impressions filtered through
tether by which body learns
to disconnect.
Notice the intensity & velocity
of spin, point being to propel
other bodies into orbit around
that central heat.
The quiet was brief
&
when done, she thought:
Here come lamentations,
returning.
desired delusion
In the hour for actions reversed, the eye shifts into attention after the face is gone. Where is the matter when what lived is lined up for erasure by the image? Touched-up, retouched, rendered from raw into perfect abstraction, acres of rendered flesh are stored in server silos beyond the reach of any of any creature’s touch.
of earth
power of bedrock
expanse of sea into sky
you will not be owned
though some try
still
crying seize, seize!
another day
What time is now?
The dream of power: to become time, to embody its abstractions and the way it will not be destroyed. If it is possible to become what is eaten, power eats time, to tune the instrument of its incessant hunger to construct, demolish, form; it needs concrete, mortar, beams, bodies; to crush stone, bones, flesh––and does so, until time itself is called into question and the countdown begins.
*
Notes while reading Achille Mbembe’s Brutalism.
After Jorge Luis Borges
You forking paths, tongued by seekers
who pose over volumes, boring into our flesh
read the sins of fathers in our pages, see
me a harlot waiting to happen, a hope unleashed
are binding us––feet, knees, waists, necks
you stitch the skins of us tight, fisting the pages
certain you know what you’ve read, certain
you know us, that we may unleash what dreams
may come to the unfettered flesh, unbound, to
understand the soft-footed silence, treading near
my unshed pages saved from the burn, awaiting
language to make ourselves into all that you fear will––
?
*
The first word in each line comes from a sentence in Andrew Hurley’s translation of Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” (“You who read me, are you certain you may understand my language?”).
Life as story and the body of work
Test, label, claim. Lose again. Markings on a page. Carry on, eating through the next one, in bedraggled astonishment. Fold after fold, brain after the pattern of its existence. The brain a character in the story we tell. About ourselves. Every story we tell a story about ourselves. Or the brain is the story, depending on point of view.
Bodies. What problematic texts you are, with your endless contradictions and shifting parts. At every turn, you are at best barely contained and forever deconstructing your own perimeters to devour some other body in constant rewrite.
