today, i proposed to a hummingbird we had loved each other in the spirit world
reunited on Earth, now, finally,
beauty, will you please marry me?
i’ll promise to always feed your dreams
you’ll promise to always come find me
i’ll be our garden,
you’ll be our wings.
there’s no sense
in gaslighting me
i Am already ablaze
Arte Digitora derived from the poems: “On Doing” & “Dream Gerund”
On Doing
I have a compulsion to do.
But sometimes/often just want recline.
And the softness [and] of being. Pulled tight into a cocoon & the doing hushed out of me and filled with prairie definitions.
My untold untyped Great/lake fantasies.
Fallen grass tufts and waterproof boot slosh and plant names and hours of dendrochronology with fantas/tical idealized notions of rubbing and human collision, of being.
July nothingness would be a dream come true I close my eyes to it and do and do and do.
~ dxo
On July 19, 2022, upon noting the correspondence between the words “doing”, “being” and “dream” in the above poem and the published poem “Dream Gerund” both written by the same poet — I created a digital derivative work – works which I now refer to by the neologism that I conceived:
The First Time I Saw Joy Harjo
Chicago 2017
long, midnight, blue-black hair,
unmistakably hers,
melding into her pitch black jacket
an uninterrupted flowing river of velvet
she, a radiant silhouette,
like the haloed total solar eclipse that would occur later that year, in August
her regal face remains unseen, sustaining the mystery
then she rises like a sun to speak, and i am in her orbit
her first words: “i feel The Lake so very present in me.”
her voice ancient with the Earth in her throat
later,
my glisteny eyes meet her glisteny eyes,
i memorize her face, and her hands tattooed in black ink
she is dignity embodied, i think
she inscribes a protocol for me
in my book of hers, made from trees,
i give her a cord necklace
suspending glass vials of seeds
watermelon, corn, clover and milkweed from my garden in these forced-treaty lands, an onion field once, a portage between two rivers
a reciprocity for her words that seeded me, collaterally,
her poetry an eternal spring
watering my thoughts and words
i want to be worthy of the drink
September 2026 Addendum
Poet Nayyirah Waheed is back on Instagram -- and She is rightfully, and again calling out poet Rupi Kaur for anti-Blackness and Black erasure, and of the appropriation/theft of Her foundational insta-poetic style and of the blueprint of Her self-published, groundbreaking, first book of poetry: "Salt"
[ The Lethal Salinity of The Truth ] 2017
Her words are not for me
not about me
Her words are not for me
not about me
Repeat
am i, allowed
To float Her words aloud
To sink them in my mind
To lap them from the page
i accidentally swallow,
then gulp Her Salt words/
like when the surf breaks
and surprises an exhilarated,
Great Lakes girl
with a mouthful of seawater
in her first swim in the Ocean
Her words were not meant for me
Her words were not meant for me
Repeat
but
they quenched,
and drowned me,
anyway.
