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.