February, 11:45 pm

Did I imagine the way our feet began to shuffle slower, slower on the ice outside our separate homes as we drew nearer?

Bread

I come from a city far east of here where the people are known for poetry
and obstinance and reliable untimeliness. I watched the city break;
it happened slowly in unsure strokes. I saw the blood spill from a skull
and blossom on rain stained pavement like watercolors, too wet.
Limp limbs startle in their sudden uselessness, revealing that
a human is a slightly more elaborate model of an arcade game,
a four-pronged claw maneuvered by a joystick. Pitch the plums
from the fruit cart to use it for the body. This is a third world country.
Compose a mourning song to moan as we make the procession. This is
a third planet world. There are endless ways to honor the dead but only one way to die.

I come from a history of fearful courage and towering cowardice.
A race of fearless vanquishers who are self-defeating in their fear of one
another. Now they possess the automated metal spitters to tear the flesh
of childrens' chests asunder. They do. The plums are crushed beneath the rush
of a hundred raving men shot by the sight of blood in the streets.
The plum pits crunch beneath shoes like bits of bone and the street is
smeared in purple skins dried in the heat absorbed by asphalt though it's winter.

I come from a people like all other people, features indefinite and human.
I take solace in bread and the kneading of dough, of making to consume.
It is to be a little god to create, devour. To create, devour.

The Cartographer of Human Experience

You says food gives you nightmares when you eat before you sleep;
I laugh and say I never have bad dreams. That night I dream I'm
on vacation with my brothers, mother, father, all my friends from
childhood and my roommates in a hotel by the seaside.
The beach is creamy and I linger there til daytime,
on the silky sand and the bed which you climb into with me. Even sunlight
won't interrupt this dream. Why do we associate springtime
with rebirth when everything is melting, melting? When I left your house
a black man on the street said "Hey, white chocolate" and
I looked at my feet and felt beautiful (which feels like
the opposite of chest gravity). You say you've been sad.
I've been sad too but I can't say out loud what comes to mind
when I recall the most profound thing I've ever felt: prostrate
in Lake Michigan and wanting not-existence. So I stay silent. You say
you want to make a map of human experience, of every type of gravity
of chest and head and throat. Two nights later I don't sleep at all,
winking through the hours, itching, wincing at the sunlight of six in the morning.
It appears we've been thrown into life without choice, but
by believing in our birth we've chosen even that. By living
we are dying. You don't know it but I only like you more when you
are stupid, foolish. I love myself for liking you and even if
you never know or feel the same I thank myself for thinking this because the thought
its making me feel beautiful. Tonight I wear an opalescent dress and life is mine.
By choosing not to die we are responsible in full for living.

Chicago, USA

Warm winds whip a city by the lakeside free
of wintery pretension, icebergs rebecoming
reflective shields on asphalt. Meanwhile an army
open fires on a crowd in a mountain city, far from here,
gray and brown as this one, six thousand miles away.
A boys head bashed in by the butt of a gun.
The most violent way to use an AK-47 is to smash
skulls with it, not firing it at all. In every video
there are others taking videos and however improbable
it is these videos have filtered to Chicago
where I watch the boy in red die a dozen times.
In one framee his mouth is open, screaming something
inaudibly, fingers outstretched like stars, torso slumped
against a cement blockade, the empty street. He wildly
runs his hands back through his hair. The next frame
his hair is stickied, thick with blood that looks like syrup.
It strikes me most the way his arms jostle with mock-life
men carry him while running, impromptu litter bearers
grabbing limbs. Suddenly the all of it seems of relative
and relatively little weight and I feel weightless,
hanging in the bloodied streets of a city far from here.

Staying Lighter Later

The sauna's heavy hotness makes my hair feel smooth and
silken, masquerades as clarity and calm behind my forehead
smooth and beaded. Every night I water wilting half-thoughts,
not-things littered in a darkish garden, brutishly unkempt.
Eons pass between the first warm day of snowmelt
and a week of open windows. Habits make the stale air ache.
Waking up to melting dreams is meddling with getting
bodies out of bed. The pinkness of the evening spreads like
rash or illness and for an hour the earth belongs to the day again.
Still I'm itchy, slipping on snowflakes rebirthed as ice.
Bruises sicken pale skin and winter lingers though the air
is warmer. False summer of the sauna parches. The seedlings
will be stomped in the frostbite of daydreams mistook for love.

Valentine's Day

After sex I see myself whole and
wholly human, as I would if unaware
of self, so I imagine. Legs to be
legs and arms to be arms. We've squeezed
meaning into flesh and flesh
does not take to essence well. Yet
we coil it 'til skin is taut, bodies
bursting with the weight of
perception, prodded, misperceived
by its own faulty tools for perceiving.
Sleep alone with heavy lids and
light a candle as a stand-in lover
'til the flicker drives you batty; blow
it out. Dreamless nights pass like days.

Funk, Sex, & Chocolate Milk (II)

The first warm day of spring rips right through
the snowbanks we're accustomed to.
Winter melts. Sunspots blind. On the black
tarred roof of a poorly stocked convenience store,
we meditate, the six of us. I lose myself in pronouns,
I and we and you and he, and on the sun-warmed tar we find
a pigeon carcass. Its toes are curled and scaly like
an alien's. Flecks of whitish flesh burst from feathers,
subway gray, and look like seed or grain, alive.
We decide to hold a water burial and march
straight to the closest sea which is a lake, infinite
and tundra-like. We dump the bird out of its
plastic shroud and watch it splash into the little stream
that twists through bergs of snow into the lake.
The current flips the pigeon belly up and minutes pass;
we watch it, like a beacon, pass from view. Home
on my front porch, I sip the warmth from air
and feel the spring leech from my flesh; I watch
the day, complaisant, settle round the sunset
like a heavy meal. It ends without precision, lingering
'til it's gone. Today I find myself insatiable, and read
through notes from class like they are words to live by:
I'm tempted by society to flee from facing death
but to tranquilize anxiety alienates one from oneself.
Your death, like mine, will be like every other death
but in your death you are irreplaceable. The only thing that I
and I alone can do is die. Every choice I make
is a choice of how I'll die. Today I find
I want it all in excess: air and wine and existentialism;
paper hearts and songs about the seaside.