“I am a black poet who will not remain silent

while this nation murders black people.

I have a right to be angry.”

#blackpoetsspeakout

“Luxury, then, is a way of

being ignorant, comfortably

An approach to the open market

of least information. Where theories

can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins

without being cracked by ideas.”

-- Amiri Baraka, Poet +

:: INTRO ::

Here I continue the conversation.

I hope you’ll join when we’re finished.

I’ll present some ideas that have sustained me

and my ongoing reimagination of political

poetry and meet/precede them with short

poems from my finishing collection,

Consequences of the Laws of Thermodynamics.

Once we’re through, these poems are yours,

whoever you are who comes to choose one.

“It is not an abstract, distanced issue out there

that just affects all those other unfortunate

people. Racism begins with you and me,

here and now, and consists in our tendency

to try to eradicate each other’s singularity

through stereotyped conceptualization.”

–Adrian Piper, Artist + Philosopher

Third Law

Each September, we suck coffee down like arsenic.

Tony vanishes through the annex bowel. Again.

Chain split vowels give me away like television.

Each café blazes to approximate ash.

Teevees rush the streets on their own two feet.

Air pockets meet hush meet crush meet moan.

We eat our phones.

“Of course there is a real need for thought and

language momentarily to focus attention on

one thing or another as the occasion demands.

But when each such thing is regarded

as separately existent and essentially

independent of the broader context of the

whole in which it has its origin, its sustenance,

and its ultimate dissolution, then one is

no longer merely focusing attention, but,

rather one is engaged in breaking the field of

awareness into disjointed parts, whose deep

unity can no longer be perceived.”

–David Bohm, Physicist + Theorist

“Seventh of all. The sheer scale of the

misanthropocene. Our minds feel small and

inert. Once every fragment seemed to bear

within it the whole. Now the whole being too

large for the mind to see stands before us

always as a fragment.”

–Juliana Spahr & Joshua Clover, Poets +

Right and Title

“if you ain’t gon’ get down then what you come

here for?

what they bring your ass up in here for if you

ain’t gon’

tear shit up? if you wasn’t just as happy to be

here as you was

to come then what you gon’ do, simple

motherfucker? the salve trade”

—Fred Moten, Poet +

“You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the

star? I’ll eat you whole.”

– Warsan Shire, Poet +

Paleontology

I step from the airplane. My hair melts dead air. I walk quickly: click-clunk, click-clunk, click-clunk. Barbara Jordan, bronze and sober, glasses poised, the last like myself I’ll see for three more days and three more days forever. Outside I slow the click-clunk to a three-sound crawl: click-clickclunk. Click-clickclunk. I am a woolly mammoth waiting at the cab stand. I am a woolly mammoth stuffed into a cab. I bear the long silence of my extinction through the rear view. My head on the back seat, horns akimbo, I melt dead air. Humans shoulder blame for the loss of large mammals like me, a new study finds. The cabbie is my cousin. My cousin carts my husk to my diorama. The radio says: "The tide is high.” The radio says: “I'm gonna be your number one."

“There is a … type of political poetry …

that seeks not so much to marshal forces

but to dramatize society’s forces as they are

marshaled, to reveal … through a manner of

approach, the effective ramifications of

living-in-the-world.”

– Stu Watson, Poet +

Zeroth Law

Brother I don’t either understand this skipscrapple world —

these slick bubble cars zip feverish down rushes of notcorn of notbeets

notcabbage and the land and the land —

you should know, man, nothing grows down here anymore except

walloped wishes and their gouged out oil cans. Where notbloodroot spans us

sit towers land mined in the sand.They twist us. They tornado us. No —

Do spring breezes bring the scent of smelt?

Remember? Even on strike our mother gathered smelt by gross fingery bagfuls

and fried them whole. I wish I knew how she did it. It was almost enough.

“It was a difficult and painful process of

sorting out my own dislocation, understanding

how my own displacement has been

translated by others and represented in the

official narratives of power. So I understood

and still understand my translation and

writing work as a decolonizing act.”

– Don Mee Choi, Poet + Translator +

second lawWho was warned about these things:the neverhush, the maddening chafe sliding down a reddened bridge, printdisappearing disappearing?

Who was told how to brook it?The houndstooth stench of olding.That time just runs itself out. Thatwe Sisyphus ourselves to glasses, hobble wreckage down stair after bricky stair.

That once we leave home—its gaseous oven—that once we walk the same slow steps as our hide-and-seek sun that once we face our anti-lovers’ anti-gaze: bright, open, later, now eyes smolderedcoats swept open to flash our own scarred bellies our own hot hands ablaze with spent matches with burnt-out love —

Who remembers love?

How it loosed its jaw to our kisses?How it unhinged us? How it tried us

like so many keys like so many rusted locks? How it missed its target despite its kicking? How maybe its force could kill us?

Without it what’s left day after dayto trundle our legs? What’s left to pushbreath ragged and torn from our lungs?

Who was warnedhow these solar winds would leave usbrown and bruised as apples over- -ripe host and blowsy seed dis-appearing disappearing?

Were you?

Me too.

“Poetry as well implies community and

relationship but the question I ask is:

Is it more accurate to say that poetry generates

community and relationships. Is, perhaps,

its greatest social function its apparent

lack of social function?”

– M. NourbeSe Philip, Poet +

A Small Matter of Engineering

The old water tower once storedevery drop we lived on. Its walls

dark-capped brick beige as supermarket pantyhose still rise

erect astride the main drag where our road splits between

opposing camps. On this side everything gone as long as anyone

remembers and winter still cold as it’s ever been. On the other side?

Listen. You’ve always had the broadest swath of the river, friend. Thing is: we’re

still here. Whatever else you’ve got left—well—let us stay parched. G’head, I dare you:

:: Thank You ::