When I come back to a place I’ve been before but not for awhile
like California, all the times I was here come up the drain:
all contexts, ex girlfriends, and bad behavior, an aura of lag and also
sun, wind, two 20 minute naps in a day, even the girl I used to be
in timeless disconnection from who arrives now— is all stapled in
this plastic ecothrift grab bag— 15 unrelated notecards and envelopes
which I’ll scatter amongst my mother, friends, lover, and benefactor—
And all the short-term and distant memories related to places (Pacific coast
Rhode Island, suburban high school with melodic sprinklers hitting the steel
grate of the fence) and times (spring, magic hour, the moony night)
these people and our relation (their names)— all collect like parts of an echo
(original utterance, negative space, walls ground and ceiling, sound changing
and layering over time) and the evening feels both very singular and fleeting
and also infinitely referential like all the covers of a really good song
Again the day stares down a pink rose nestled in a white primrose bush
I described the flowers at breakfast already and wrote about them
in a postcard, then dispossessed myself of the postcard, so here I am
recording it a third time for myself. To send the letter I walked down
a busy road not built for pedestrians, as in many towns in the west
took photos of sculptural aboveground pipes and the Women’s Club
then returned to the seat near the roses where repetition makes
a song of my life. Wind in California reminds the homies of threats
of fire despite recent rain and a gutting loyal blue afternoon sky
wind reminds my Boston ass of being cold in winter
Obviously now we must and are assessing the integrity
of different forms of treating pain and other symptoms
of empire in light of the desperation of its crumbling facades
the universities are revealed to be financial instruments
and we mean to hold the suffering of the world, folds of
which we have some practice finding pleasure or poetry
inside of, looking for protections in the recurrence
of spring and even in the humility of words
I find it difficult to locate myself in absence of my objects of
conditional love, though I swear I’m trying so hard to know
god is in even the most difficult people and even in the vivid
brutality of global violence and violence of my conditional love
and in the distance that enables this incessant description
A poet says it is good to describe something. Fine
I agree, despite avoiding designations such as this
in chronic insistence on perverseness of these terms
It is good to describe something, to confirm conditions of
being here specifically, life’s private index, physically holding
attachment to linear time in a deepening ravine between my eyebrows
and in the fading blossom that started to bud my first day in Vallejo
a skinny orange cat in dappled light walks close to the window
the bedroom is foggy every morning— the sun records distance
from the past detailed in notes I double back to from the weeks before
I displaced myself from those other situations: a crush of content
over three long spring pages where I wrote out the student journalists’
descriptions as they were pushed to the edge of campus
by a paramilitary force flooding the quad the story flooding
a single earbud toward the back of the general meeting—
a contained and private sound against the public sounds of the room
bifurcating two places at once, or separating my consciousness
under two reality regimes in adjacent boroughs
the space surrounding my body and its distance
from the sound of the scene described in fragments in pen
in my notebook held out to a third person beside me
now all press being escorted off campus
nobody witnessing what’s omg sledgehammers
throwing students the human barricade is still there
police contraption on 116th and amsterdam
locking the gates around reporters no exit
all the spectators outside dispersed
police entered hamilton hall
These are old friends I’ve been bad news with before
the most recent episode is late night courthouse romance
waiting out the paperless underground at central booking
where night stops according to the ruthless clock and morning
is climate controlled and fluorescent. I try to call you up from
the basement like I had that power, pulling my favorite character
into a lucid dream, sleep like a train ride only brings more speed
and careless description
It’s hard to sleep or know time from underground
double sounding double body of my twinning
which we learned to survive inside, in triangular relation
to each other and the first challenges of life—
this geometry extends the physical bunker around my sister
to house my mind and splits open two-toned nights, two of them
start with a subway ride with you, our first dawn in a way
followed by two days downtown, atmospheric cigarette
watching teenagers get out of jail for the first time or sleep
with a cardboard box for a pillow on the pavement
subdued waiting for their friends, hollering every time a kid
with purple temples and chins scraped from the dragging and
stomping of them by adults was escorted back to the scene
And when will you let me spend a regular night in your bed
you send some lines or memory of Faulkner and say
you only found this passage because I wasn’t there to distract you
in exemplary assimilation of the echo framework I now regret sharing
for how astutely I understand you will use it toward distance
Silence and the sweetness, and the alternating pain, of silence
there is an eternal flame of sorts here in the tunnel, a cord
connects all tunnels worldwide and their purpose over time
Rage in the city is passed down between fast generations
dying and living up close to one another, fucking and
being disappointed, peeling off, taking the opportunity
of getting out of jail to taste a freedom differential like coming in
from a cold night to a warm apartment, or diving from a hot day into the sea
I am seeing her
see the sun and take liberties
calling anybody she wants on the telephone
breathing air, praying on clean ground, each bruise
and burn is photographed for future cases, she drinks
three gatorades to the face retroactively, my attention
stands close enough to see water come back to her face
in tending, holding my hand in the bright hot prelude
to summer, walking to pick up a large backpack full
of spiritual supplies and herbal medicine contained
in an industrial trash bag at the fifth precinct ... oh
my echo ... how could I not be describing you
Our capacity for love is changing
this informs the tactics and strategy
and the tensions between alternate rationale
for catastrophe mobilized in every language
meetings and motivations are sutured together with conditional
love as desire for freedom abuts desire for ordinary entanglement
relieving loneliness, referring back to a photograph of a hand
loosening a screw to change the bike tire that popped on a curb
in the park after we whipped the vote and before we addressed
subtle infighting about how hard to celebrate. I’m glad some people
felt scared of us for once, that regular life is threatened
as it should be, I love our enemy I just know I’m right
about justice here and obviously I’m a terrible politician
alienating middle of the road voters
anyway we made our presence known
Adjacent pages show how I’ve been living, sound of days
reverberates hard fast and dense: violence is a tactic
not a strategy, my love poem rubs against notes
from Mohamed Abdou’s talk and personal notes from
whatever we will call the nascent thing emerging with
forms of insurgence remaining blessedly nameless
careful practice of not having a direct channel between mine
and my doubles’s heart underground, knowing our communication
was and is wired to the earliest fires of our most real and wretched longing
knowing the arc of justice wants to spank history now which is to say
light bends toward the edge of the world where ugliness is our treasure
the autodidacts can boss up, I would love health insurance
but will settle for having doctor friends
Sorry to be literal but I’ve been dreaming
and praying so long on our chance for extreme
non-continuation, mixing that could break open
this discipline to favor risk, the dark, our methods
proliferating terribly through this period of destructions
describing how a thing is perversely, such as my man
the pink rose who did lose his humble perfection
admirably knowing when to die
In California it is different and beautiful I am received
by my friends each time regardless of what is on fire
agreeing from distance or illusory closeness through fierce looking
and mutual description still echoing speech and exalted nonspeech
speculating against assimilations that have been encouraged
and expected of us, building on cacophonies, each possibility
involves some horrible rupture and unimaginable loss but
nobody shy away from true love anymore let’s promise