the diasporic tendency of voluntary amputation.

i’m standing in between two sidewalks.

let me be unambiguous:

i am standing in the middle of a street.

it is a one-way street.

there are no cars on this street, at least

           not at this hour.

this is an hour for the hungry, for sleeplessness. 

for fodder. 

this street resembles a street i know, but

            cannot place.

like a name to a face.

like a smell to a person.

like a role to an actor.

alright, i’m getting carried away.

i wander this quarter and ask myself “haven’t i been here before?”

i know that i haven’t.

this street is different when there are no cars on it.

when there are not no cars on it

there are ants.

these ants are dispersed from their colonies.

they offer themselves to crooks.

they walk with their hands in their pockets so that

           if when they stumble it will be difficult to break their fall.

(perhaps it won’t be difficult, just onerous.)

a diasporic tendency of voluntary amputation.

i’ll repeat what i said:

the amber lamps compete with dirt and fog for illumination or;

           is this city on fire again?

in which case-

we’ve finally found clarity.

you say you have no choice but

remember the night we decided against death?

we’d had a lot to drink that night, and even more to say to each other.

our words wrapped around our fingers like string.

they bound us together but

           when i went to jail i was forced to remove my shoelaces.

let me be unambiguous:

the strings that keep my shoes to my feet have the potential of becoming nooses or

maybe they were afraid i would go after the guards.

i mean, 

           the ropes we tie ourselves together with can also be used to strangle each other.

but i’m getting off topic again-

there is a noise

this noise is the the progeny of a nausea.

this noise hums a song, but 

           this song is insensible.

it is an elegy.

it is sung not for the dead but

           for those who live in restlessness.

i’ll repeat what i said:

this street has limits, it is finite.

we have none, we 

           have set a categorical imperative against them.

the trees that line this street grow to a certain height until

the sky begins to mirror this growth, 

           backwardly.

we stand beneath this sky and scream,

           bashfully.

we am not screaming, we find.

only whispering in the woods.

i mean,

a cobblestone sea floods a dry ditch

& mirthless laughter becomes the background music to this silent film.

our words-

           subtitles.

they are written in a language that’s been dead for ten thousand years.

this language inhabits a slumber-less death or

           we are not here to wake the dead,

           rather to put them to rest.

be

liefs fallen from

dead

trees

after

the fall

one thousand

decembers

& springs that flood the Saharra

endless

summer.

on things we hope to make real & actualities we tried to make unreal.

the shies

we shriek

when we

say death

i mean,

yes.

i actually believe in that

the cackle

we heave

when we

say death

I mean,

no.

i don’t.

like children on a country road.

1600 years of erotic art.

an axe a sky a shreik a battle cry let’s call this screaming with a “d” lets tear the wallpaper off the skies there are no rules for what the sun can and cannot do on mars no now here comes the moon let’s see if we can get it to land in the delta to flood the canyons that dried up with history’s concubines they’ve bill’t it just for them the graveyard the potential staying open always open no god no state no family no joy without anxiety no life without death no art without immortality an unconditional imperative said Issy to love things that you love nothing about no plots no narrative only actors repeating their lines long after the play has ended no fact no fiction only a story so eclectic it stole all the conviction from history so that towns that had been nuked walked out of atlases and fought back. sirens that go on ringing long after there’s anybody alive to hear them do they still ring of course they still ring nobody heard them when they were alive why would they stop wringing when everybody has gone extinct? Abraham Lincoln threw empty shotgun shells back at Horatio, and Hamlet wrote CHOOSE DEATH across the remaining segments of the berlin wall in hopes of changing the way history books were written. Poetry, he called it. None of this was intentional, but I meant everything I said. the low, raspy voice of Disappointment peters out. his tone makes your toes squirm in your shoes. tragedy and impropriety wept. in a corpse, Nathan found a jar of tears wept by the sun after the cold war ended. the horses that carried the soldiers at the front of the offensive turned out to be angles with their eyes closed. angels who, upon reawakening, were forced to recognize Agony, their frail daughter. coercive recognition is surely one of the most cruel experiences of this life. accused of neglect, they were all forced to admit that they didn’t really love her anymore, that birth was indeed the original sin. lovelessness. the assistant went out for a swim in the lake, and the sea swam to the swift chyme of the goat god’s bell screaming for him to return back to shore. back at home, where doctors give surgery with pocket knives and infected patience are left with no other option than to sew their wounds up with mandolin strings, in hopes of addressing the nomenclature of harmonies. i walked across the sky on a gossamer & spun a seamless web over the hollowed out chest of a dead horse. the silliness we hope to make real- so much better than the actualities we try to make unreal.

from the organ through which gravity speaks

mirrors tell tall tales

in 1962

in limbo

inside a hostis

in Cuba

in either/or

in between law and life

in clarity

in parallax

in giving firearms back to their makers

in the crack 

in the sky

or;

between

the sky &

the sky

from the organ through which gravity

speaks

from an ill-tempered piano

from a winter with a thousand decembers

from springs that flood the Sahara

to ears immune to disbelief

to opaline clouds

to winters spanning summers

becoming other

being whatever

on the 7th month

from asymmetry sutured in harmonics

how to write sentimental bullshit.

you shattered an atmosphere around me. broken glass sputtered about a serene brook. trees that reached their fingers into the sky like synapses reach themselves into the dark continents of your organs. where the only company was found in the wind’s poem- rattling the leaves, sustaining a hiss that became but a mute whisper. a breath, that became contrapuntal to my manic panting. like intertwining your chest with anothers, whose composure reminds you that breathing should be something that happens, not something that you do. i told you that the only thing i was afraid of was happiness. there used to be times when i would push myself until i bled just so that the moon would have something to shine into. like looking through your pockets to find something you’ve lost. no matter how many times you’ve checked, you check again and again, each time knowing you won’t find it, but hoping that you will. i would find things in my pocket that disappeared when i pulled them out. they weren’t absent, they were there, but they could never materialize, they were always internal. they always needed a shelter. that shelter became a roof i built above my head. i found horror where other people found beauty, and found harmonies in the echoes of silence. but i was always subtracted into the vacancy of a large town with no inhabitants. a refugee camp for an absentee population. a town stuck in a cleft of history’s possibilities that are void of actuality. a town where megalomaniacs reach out to strangers to ask  them if they’re doing ok, and nobody dreams when they sleep, because the imaginary and the material have become inextricable. where kids that used to write “CHOOSE DEATH” on the underside of bridges write philanthropic aphorisms instead. in short, a town that never existed. a solitary confinement governed by the horrors of my imagination. a town where i would find myself dying of thirst next to fresh water springs. where i could turn a beam of light into a shaft of opacity. so that your presence gave me a sort of paralysis. a sheltering sky.

why am i dying of thirst on river beds?

speaking of an infinite only found in difference.

failed harmonies leave a symmetry betrayed in the words of a cassandra.

hairpins for hysterics.

fences in search of

stillborn sheep

laugh

at

carpenters with

creation myths.

and like ventricles

of capital

sing elegies for the unborn.

the citiy wielded by

unconcealed tongues;

starmaking

& mapping we

where I

was found distilled

into a surrogate drone.

pages pinned together

with a nexus of bent nails

resist interpretation

yet remain homeward bound

a sublation: ascent into

the cimmerian familiarity

of a messiah without a face-

her axe

makes flowers weep

as a libation

before she turns them into

composites aborted by the sun;

immortality is relegated

to a conduit of design.

a combustible snow

gives fire to the limbs of trees

and asks to have done away

with the skeleton of unkindled appendages.

and like this

ghosts tiptoe across the rim

of your pursed lips