A Stenographer Tries to Finish a Sentence
Look, the tree outside is
just a tree, a simple set of
deciduous life-expectancy
And whenever you talk to me
I’m just a headlong hammer, a
cracked braying thing,
But I know we are not
speaking of infinities
or perennials, or anything green
Look, I’m just trying to explain
that to be drowned is just
another form of feeling the rain
That this here heart-curve,
is a chaise lounge for you
to put your feet on
Not to say you made me furniture,
rather when you were looking for
syllable, I was a whole chord
Pressed in unison, reaching some
300 words per minute, some kind
of archive of feeling, surely
Look, I’m trying to explain the
sign signified relationship but
the problem is I’ve kind of
Forgotten it because when
I look at the tiles shuttering moss
on the roof, I see a continent
And when I look at you
a foreign nation I don’t
speak the language of
But I can type fast,
so I can keep recording
what you say whether
I get it or not.
A poet tries to find a metaphor or the distance of the moon
AAAAto Sydney
I promise I’m not like one of those poets who cares about the moon unless you care about the moon in which case I’m one of those poets who cares about the moon. did you know my friend told me across the water there are children who are being turned into the moon by the bushel and her hand rested on the bulletproof vest of someone she went to high school with before he turned into a redacted line. and did you know that on fish island where they live in warehouses a man described the party as the community’s watering hole as small hands held together so strong they might as well be the moon but the area is marked for luxury developments. in hackney wick I walked across the narrow channel and overheard the boatman talking about a protest while sanding down a ladder into some kind of weapon. I promise weapons are just ways to get us into the moon but I think italo calvino already said that and better. listen, in the night I dream of my father dying and of the black cat that was sleeping on the bed dying because we let it out by mistake and I dream of everyone dying usually unless it’s people who are actually dead or dying in which case I don’t dream of them at all. poets don’t have metaphors for cancer. poets also don’t have metaphors for things that are unfair. poets also don’t have metaphors for the moon unless you count the jellyfish. I think that’s what it’s all about really. maybe this is mercy. outside the moon.
How I stopped bombing and learned to love the worry
Because the book you made
was not the sum of enough tears
but a bomb I want to be a bomb
so bad but I’m a grocery list instead
with 17 pounds on my bank account
do I have to have money for mascara
to be considered a monarch butterfly?
I promise I too have migrated across
the Great Lakes like the man you love
might migrate across your mouth
filling it with salt - and I love the taste of a man
but you’re not supposed to say it so I poured over
vinegar instead like I was in Hurt Locker
trying to cut the right wire trying to
stop the bomb the barrage the artillery the
metaphor and maybe the centre of the bomb
wasn’t shrapnel but a child alternatingly mistaken
for a boy and a girl who refuses to elaborate or
maybe there are bombs in the world that aren’t metaphors that fall on hospitals.
And here in the background hum of empire
I think I’m the bomb that I’m hot shit I’m the
bees fucking knees being fucked on my
knees and it’s all quite funny isn’t it - the tab on your
tongue becoming an alligator when you said woman
and meant something that gets shot out of a gun
and meant you and when you didn’t answer
a text for over a week my heart fluttered to you as a monarch
butterfly look mom I can repeat a metaphor and I cleaned your apartment
which was like after a bomb see mom the English degree paid off and I
tried to make you sleep jaw wired shut on six
pills of Concerta and your heart wasn’t
a butterfly but an engine with a missed oil change shitting blood shitting poetry and
slurring over your triple vodka lemonade that
helped you sleep you said if you want to get into this you’ve
got to let go of definition and I did
three years later somewhere in North Greenwich I came
looking at the London skyline and I finally realised the bomb
wasn’t a heavy thing lodged in your diaphragm
but this here skyline, unfolding
The Choosing / Luthier
AAAAafter Ramsey Tawfick
That I could find myself at the end of the driveway, half-nude and giggling
That the darkness in the yard spoke by its own accord
That indeed, between me and the world, there was a horizon
There, I lived in a time of the body no longer being the body
And now an appendage of the dark trembling mountain
Instead of the old crow coming to feed on trifling things like meat
That I too lived somewhere in the age of planes – and that sound wasn’t death but capital time
That I had forgotten how to rest, that this too was work
Though the sound of death was humming just beneath all that was poem
Which is to say beneath everything and that I’d bought a violin I did not know how to play
That I said poem and meant work, that this was where I’d forked the side of my palm
Tired of living in the tightening knot of material
That I too was used to it by now, preferring silky to glossy
That the horsehair too was tightened by the frog on the stick
That maintaining the superstructure had left me tired
That searching infinitely for a god that could be proven, I too forgot the body
That in its existence the body did not change me, and that was it
That I was mostly the body, if not the for the pesky stain of language
That between this dust and that dust lived expectation
For a sky full of paper, a scratching-blue with the sound of bells
And that whistling, it all came undone, my body, my solitude
That to look from a mountain is only to understand scale
That the mountain changes you and that I was changed by the mountain
100 ways to say apocalypse
Continuous points of failure. Nature is a dense collection of objects. I forgot to send the email. I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to finish the book. Ekolokero. My job is that of taking care of ruins. Ruins. The song in all things. My father saying he misses England and my friends. My friends. I got you a magnet. The lakeside, at night, the trees against the night sky like the ridges of an iris. Like roots. Like nerve-endings. Like trees. I don’t think it matters. My mother collecting magnets. The kid dressed in a full Santa-costume saying goodnight to everyone outside. Children &. The rubble. A full stop. The little we have to say. The liquid punch of the moon. The security guard at the airpot saying brother like it wasn’t a bullet but an invitation. Open hands that are invitations. Are you working tomorrow? The morning sun when it’s pale like a stranger. The sky an expectant blank canvas. Have you eaten? The cashier’s eyes bright like a funeral & by that I mean bright. My grandfather growing a beard to prove that he could. My hair greying at 18. Saying I take part in your sadness instead of condolences. Someone choosing North. Choosing South. Choosing. Otan osaa. Lightning without thunder. Tide-pools. The tide. Resistance. My mother saying it is snowing. Dropping cinnamon and turmeric in the glass jar to make the earth weep. To recreate, in its own image, the earth. Desire. Vapour-trails like someone zipping up the sky & flaming above the clouds. Climate. The driver wondering at the weather. The UN strategically forgetting the word environment. The co-pilot flying this time around. The wind that does not think of deserving. Two contradicting thoughts in our heads simultaneously. Death and death. Encontros & despedidas. Meaning and the bit. Amor fati and the other. The mesh. Still. The books in dollhouses are real paper and you can write on them. There’s no reason for that. This here sunset, playing the trumpet. My cousin collecting our grandmother’s poetry into a pamphlet saying I wanted to build her an autobiography. To be one person for one day, for one other person. My friends waiting outside the bus station. I would say I’ll come back, but I can’t promise that anymore than I can promise rain. The stone circle of their faces. Just their faces. Your face. Your face. Your face & the rain.
From top to bottom
AAAAafter Ada Limón
Sometimes I like to be a little dramatic,
thinking I would learn how to use these legs like
digits in a typewriter, so unlike the roots of a tree.
I haven’t forgotten that you said there are so many
stories to use, staring up from the bottom of a pool
somewhere in France. I thought about lust –
the desire of life to repeat more life, to be a seashell
to the universe’s body, the same blood forming an ocean
in the aural, looming into a past that felt mostly like
a baggage claim center, an old stolen metaphor.
And so I pick a suitcase. Carry it with me to the
end of the garden, where I try to imprint the
biotope into the poem. My birds and my bees.
And I’m twenty-five now, excited and terrified
of all the things that grow, me included.
I heard the biggest forest on the isles is in Scotland,
but I’m not sure there are any forests here at all.
Those dark living things. As a child, with my father
we visited the cashew of Pirangi, wide like a map.
I remember it was cool underneath, like a city but better.
And it means something to my father that I am here –
yet another hop, a confirmation bias for nomadic nature but
I still feel like that doesn’t explain it. Like I would
have done it anyway, if for no other reason than
to do it. Whatever happens happens. The growth no
longer hampered by sunlight or a perfect state.
Not because of, but despite.
Reading
AAAAafter Ben Lerner
does the song really predate the people? I feel I have misunderstood something, like catching the light in heavy handfuls over the river thames, heaving with my back not my feet, watching you turn around from the crouching figure, the man illuminated by the headlight of the bike, accidentally sidestepping reality. in the desert that is the future, sadness has to come before life does, before the country bumpkins become a hole full of prescription drugs. a man shoves a bunch of leaves into his mouth, convincing us they are spearmint. in another time you would have been quarried down the hole, splashed in the construct. If this here is a system, imagine a circle. we are approaching the centre from opposing sides, but all I really wanted to know was whether our politics align. you might be the worst person to start a cult, or the best, because you wouldn’t start a cult. I’m speaking of not working, of loving a good brown piece of syntax, not tilling it, but letting it spiral. if someone gave me a hundred thou, I’m pretty sure I would become beautiful. look at the scarf of the man walking past us at the train station, it must have cost at least that. half of these people wouldn’t notice if we robbed them. should we? sometimes I steal things because I fundamentally disagree about their price. but most of your friends are dead or dying, at best marginalised. how do we steal their futures back? would you like to till the desert? you’re right, this anger must have predated the song, predated language, because why else would I frown all the way into my own centre trying to describe it, flatten it into a word like so much chucked-out bathwater. you say love doesn’t predate the song, doesn’t even predate word, but that we made it and can unmake it into fear, and that this is all about refusing power. how do you stay sane then? how do you know which sacrifices to make – there are two great love stories in your life, and you, knowing, can hold two contradicting thoughts in your mind, and they both become birds, not cute like sparrows, but ready to fight like swans. I’m ready to fight for the song, but not with violence. this anger, this song, it all predates at least some of that. predates violence. at least I think. you ask me if I’m ready to put the light down, and I ask why. you say to let it ripple off the water, to let it come after us.
