ravenous

i float through spring on my eyes
chartreuse
red, purple

and
gold

errant, precious dandelions, i adore you

grape hyacinth, moss, catkins, i witness you like reverent time-lapse, like it’s my last spring / is it?

i listen for chorus frogs and woodcocks at twilight, i heard you both tonight

i watch deer roam in forage for hours/ i watch for owls for hours, praying for their roost here – til there’s no more light and i strain my eyes

where did this city girl learn her patience/ ah /

i am patient – only-children hone in, observe/ our solitude, attention is god-like, our currency is to witness, listen and create

but i am also feral, enchanted, propelled and debauched by the colors, sounds and sex

of spring

no one’s here to call me in / and i forget to eat til i am

ravenous or ravishing (my favorite malapropism)

but the mud, my knees – and my hips

remind me
that i am also

moored, cold and full of aching longing

clinician

i’ll never forget
how when my heart was breaking
you went to see a foreign film in the suburbs with your family
like it was nothin’
the next day, proceeded to tell me about Korean film and
K-pop like an old man who was just hearing about it for the first time in 2022,
like someone who never knew anyone and who traveled to Korea, for a semester abroad or to teach English, or anything, despite your worldliness and AAdvantages,
like someone who never heard
of BTS, Map of The Soul,
or Carl Jung
it was then i realized how
ignorant and insular,
and Lechter-like you were,

you eat people to feed your ego,

and i was a fucking feast

your heart rate never rose the whole time

but your dick sure did

siphon

drove past the new plasma store
they’re buying, not selling
do you need to know more?

old cars fill up the vast parking lots
that pristinely fresh concrete,
marred by oil and brake fluid spots

this is a tale-of-two-river-cities,
white kids don’t sell platelets here/
this is no college town
this place was known
for Black boys, kidnapped and drowned

this fucking joint, is it never empty/
how many times can they draw blood per person, per month/
is it just two times – or twenty?

Freedom Plasma: there’s still Black blood to be drained!
24-7 audacity and
not ONE DROP of shame

[a mint by any other name, would smell as metallic, or seem so profane?]

Black families stay siphoned
but even this act’s communal
offering their bodies, their blood,
for some food for their children
for used work boots at Goodwill

white folks, “donate” for good effect and for “good will”
see, both their lifesource and red cross donor cards are near-filled/
and by the way, “I voted”, but that sticker fell off
“I want you to know:
I punched straight “D” — but, of course!”

/ tsk, tsk: “you know, “they” blew through their child tax credit refund already!”
but thank god, The Feds made certain:
Tech banks are liquid, and crypto’s steady/

dear human, woman,

if you are acquainted with nearly every star in Orion and Canis Major in the Southern Night Sky from the Northern Hemisphere;

& Castor and Pollux have glimpsed you both in and out of your blue pyjamas;

& the Moon spotlights your face like you’re the star of the show, while asleep in bed, insisting you wake up and be both worshipped and worshiper

through your bedroom windows, overlooking a wet meadow, a dirt road and then some trees,

from a ramshackle, old green house that effortlessly called you in, to hold you, and to hold you down

on this good Earth,

for a short while/

then, dear human, woman,

you are doing fine,
you are fine,
it’s all fine

nothing gold can stay
except your own treasure of a heart

you, above all, know this

so, all you need do,
is keep

keep, keep, keep

lying in bed, 4:59 AM EST, March 15, 2023
Continue reading “dear human, woman,”

residuum II | collab with Yeats – he only died 84 years ago

pushed to the margins
hanging on by one stressed thread
to toxic or barren fringe-lands

when the once-verdant centres could, and did, hold

us, all/

“Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

while now, all about it

reel shadows of the indignant [shore] birds

harkening

one day soon, you too, will be residuum here


what remains: gulls converge in a chasmic rain-filled pothole in the parking lot of an abandoned mall, Benton Harbor, Michigan

An ephemeral asphalt pond after heavy rains in the parking lot of an abandoned mall, long-infested with gulls, as testimony – not merely to the inorganic evolution of consumerism, but of the intersection of NAFTA and other free-trade agreements, American soft segregation and hard apartheid, and the inherent discriminatory and predatory migration of US and Western global capitalism.


Continue reading “residuum II | collab with Yeats – he only died 84 years ago”

poem for poet: Warsan Shire

drink


her voice, delicious, spiced rum
her intellect, clear, Russian vodka
her truth, painful, white lightning
her beauty, full, Mourvèdre
her medicine, holy, mezcal

intoxicated and wrecked

you will drown willingly
soberly denouncing air,
pulled into the depths of her luminous current


and for women, womxn, womyn, womqn – who are difficult to love, click & hear

this


have mercy, also hear Warsan Shire here, and here.



Continue reading “poem for poet: Warsan Shire”

he swept


swish, swish, knock
swish, swish, knock
a rhythm, a metronome
once a week,
usually Sunday

you felt very near today, also a Sunday, me weeping while sweeping, or vice versa

my movement conjured you, conjured the once-me and the eternally you/
me, looking down from the landing
you, nearing the top of the 2-flat stairs
in your white t-shirt
looking up over your glasses at me, with your big eyes
with your snaggle-toothed smirk, mustached/
broom in hands / pure lank, elegance

had i snapped a photo of you on them stairs
with that look/
and, what if i had!
could you ever become a once-person, an image
in a box, on a hard drive,
in or on a cloud, to me
and not a living moment on a Sunday,
pulled in from the ether, so present, me sweeping while weeping, or vice versa
in this quiet, rural place so unrecognizable from
our once-home

i never even bothered to count them stairs /all them chances


grail

here am i

my eyes stigmata
overflowing saltwater
corresponding
heartache of this life, heartbreak of this world,

this cross of water, women carry

here i am

creating
fresh watersheds
from my headwaters/
my tears runoff into wrinkle streams/
flowing tributaries converge into
rivers desalinated in sediment of flesh/
creases of time and depth
weather my face/
carved canyons carry
rapids down my cheeks/
raging confluence pours into
the lake of my mouth, onto bed of my tongue/
spilling waterfall
down my throat
into ocean of my heart/

torrents cascading over my lips, chin, breasts,

plummeting
in monsoon

flooding the desert at my feet/

take, drink,

and bloom

james, thank you.

a man who knew my father befriended me
he caused me to question the nature of my reality,
my history, its validity,
my possibly-false memories
all viewed through the lens
of a person
who had vested interest in
indoctrinating me
who preferred my naïveté
under guise of protectivity


the last time i saw my father, Christmas break, age 6, Waukegan, Illinois

parents can write stories on the folds of the cerebrum,
their pens go unchallenged
until they’re challenged /
their ink is like cord blood,
except it can re/generate — or damage

it only takes one person
to crack the sky,
then we astronomers spend
our lives asking the zealots
a non-answerable “why?”

poem for poet: Joy Harjo


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 velvet river
she, a radiant silhouette, like the haloed total solar eclipse that would occur later that year

her regal face is unseen, sustaining the mystery

then she rises like a sun to speak and i am in orbit

her first words: “i feel The Lake so very present in me.” / her voice weighted by the very 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/

she inscribes a protocol for me
in my book of hers, made of trees, and i think why am i, who am i, here

I give her a necklace
suspending glass vials of seed
watermelon, corn, clover and milkweed made by my hands on these forced-treaty lands

my symbolic reciprocity / for her poems that seeded me, collaterally

her poems are a well that
still water my thoughts and words

although i am not sure i am deserving of the drink/

god, i never want to be just another culture thief


Protocol,
from How We Became Human
New & Selected Poems 1975-2001
Joy Harjo

Continue reading “poem for poet: Joy Harjo”

dream[t] poetry: “dynamic rib”

this poem is inspired and directly derived from a dream i woke up from/with

on February 15, 2023

and is an experiment of raw dreaming dialogue and internal dreaming monologue to express the dreamt experience in poetic format using minimal metaphoric phrasing and language

a familiar woman sitting on the couch
in your house asks me
how many hours do you have to yourself
i am perplexed: “all of them”
they’re all my hours

the roof begins leaking
the one you fixed last year
the one i was reading under while she asked me about my hours
i noticed when the book
suddenly became smattered with rain drops
water drops or raindrops, what’s the difference

it was a Rugrats coloring book
i don’t know what page i was on
but Angelica was waiting to be colored-in and one of the boys was saying “mommy” in a speech bubble
it must’ve been a thought bubble because the Rugrats, except for Angelica, are not verbal

Continue reading “dream[t] poetry: “dynamic rib””

bardo

somebody, quick!

pinch me,
call me,
talk to me,
see me,
kiss me,
curse me,
feed me,
bathe me,
fuck me,
flip me off,
for god’s sake

I can’t tell
if I survived
that last

collision

i thought we were making a left turn

you made a u-turn instead

you turned, you turned, you turned

i was a passenger / but not riding shotgun

no restraint / then suddenly ejected

/am i a ghost/

or

am i behind the wheel,

am i under them

am i disembodied

am i looking down from above

or gazing in from the periphery

49 days, what the fuck?!