Can You Sign My Tentacle?

by Brandon O'Brien

  or that it carries petabytes

  to be unlocked via psychic probe

  or verbal passcode

  unraveling is a course of our flow

  that which stores us is undone

  only we get to record the path

  in curling fists of language

  if you can’t make sense of what

  the rhythm of time seeks to say

  then it wasn’t for you

  postcard 20xx, where there are no dirges

  the streets can’t help but sing our names back to us. it

  sounds like a

  Mother’s Union choir rising out of the mango roots, a well

  geysering with love. every tanty’s voice was a procession orchestrated

  * * *

  to keep the block stone-still, to remind us of when the

  lapels would plot

  to kick the dust out of the pavement, to paint it chaconia

  by

  at least six-thirty, to write the words SOMEBODY

  CHILD in chalk, certain

  * * *

  of the justice of wild and swinging pain. i remember when the whole gang

  of boys on my block come to see the ancestors off, our

  mothers and the leaders

  of every mass muttering under their breath, Lord, make sure to take them in,

  * * *

  the streets are a frigid region. we sing every name, craft

  Johnnie flambeaux, the

  ice boxes burst open with juice and rapid comfort for the

  aches, we slap hope

  against we thighs to keep the rhythm as your granny dance

  in the kitchen to

  * * *

  the sound of your father’s name. all of us boys remember

  the night we get

  our mother scared the first time, her writing our names everywhere, whispering it like a national

  anthem into the corners of the house, hoping the bricks

  would lend us support

  sometimes my brother would venture outside our garden’s

  edge into the

  castle that the past had built to store the children that they

  didn’t plan

  to make soil of right away. he would stare at it for hours,

  try to

  pull loose bricks out hoping he would destabilise

  the wall, say he was just making sure that all of the

  spirits got free. he said he hoped they swam the whole sky above the country,

  * * *

  that nothing kept them still but their mothers. he and

  the others wrote the names of the men without children,

  put

  the papers together as kites, let the wind take each by law.

  every evening he found a new one, gazette paper abiding,

  he made sure the evening got all its forsaken citizens

  before our mother called us back in

  * * *

  for dinner. And he’d eat like for all of history’s harm’s

  done, he let some names live forever, in our mother’s way.

  hunting dog

  in the dim

  the name on my box

  is of the expected dead

  missed and still invisible

  * * *

  don’t study how easy

  they rise up foam of spit

  of drunkard journalists

  bylines growing hot

  * * *

  their names fresh-wet

  on the door of my casket

  once, it said Sean, and

  muddy water filled my mouth

  * * *

  silence smelling of sugar and blood—

  it said Keyana, cloth dragged

  from my chains, I smell

  sweat and tears, muffled agony

  * * *

  rings through my ears—

  then Dana, and the links

  round my hand electroplated,

  judgment-light pours out stigmata.

  * * *

  and each morning I must bear the

  ignoble sacrifice of waking

  sober-faced, no wolf-teeth,

  no quenk-head, justice does wait

  * * *

  for nightfall for me to hold your sins,

  Simon helping Trinidad to bear them,

  listening to them wail on my back,

  what kind of monster?

  indeed.

  me, chained, a thing with fangs—

  * * *

  a hunting dog, with birds on my back

  —and then, become so cursed

  as to look like you.

  * * *

  let me tie you to their names.

  smell and sip their unmakings.

  your blood does taste better chilled anyway

  but you better learn before I consume.

  Hastur Asks for Lord Kitchener’s Autograph

  Far stranger things have revealed themselves

  in the spaces between the mundane and the much-more-than,

  where bees unlock voix celeste,

  where the dead just want All Fours partners.

  He done learn sometimes the unknown

  just need someone to sing in their direction.

  When the guest holds out a tendril,

  say ‘my daughter loves your work’,

  Kitch already grinning.

  Whatever words share in this moment

  I could only believe:

  song-stories from new and wilder places

  trade in the breaths between uncapped marker

  and stained vellum skin. Hastur nods.

  How often do you get the chance

  to share a moment this grand?

  It must have stunned him to pure silence

  thick enough to be mistaken

  for dread.

  the lagahoo speaks for itself

  you think I is the monster?

  nah—I is just a funeral procession

  with canine teeth.

  I does keep the lists when

  you forget your children’s names,

  I growl them low in the night.

  I am a rabid memorial—

  one that does snatch the mournless from their beds,

  one with breath that stink like remorse

  I know the scent of every dead girl’s close male relatives

  I could sense the sour of trigger fingers

  in the alleys at the edges of hotspots

  and the sticky-sweet of six figures

  in the conference rooms with the hotshots

  and all of them left residue on the dead

  still fresh-wet on the bones,

  stones slick with your wickedness.

  you think I is the monster?

  I don’t eat my young.

  I will, however, feast on the

  tight-fisted and apathetic how I please,

  calling their names over the dinner plate,

  breaking all your headstones into my palms,

  picking my teeth with the memory of your name.

  Lovecraft Thesis #2

  (Splendor & Misery, Face B, Track 2)

  * * *

  Violence makes good background noise

  for anything. Even for knowledge.

  People suffer for knowing all the time

  in your stories—you know, the ones where

  something shrouded in shadow stalks the

  corridors between neon and dancing

  with its eyes on everything gentle

  and its tendrils on everything glimmering.

  How dare you tell me this is somehow

  unfathomable?

  * * *

  What is the block, child?

  What is it if not the night

  turning liminal, sliding into the dark upper sea

  where we hold back knowing?

  It batters the bones of things

  that want to see beyond their horizon,

  it is the
storm that walls off the new edge of the world,

  the barricade that blurs treasure or threat

  outside your reach.

  * * *

  And yet you still wish to know.

  To venture beyond fear’s camp.

  To lose your mind in its gyre.

  The corner will cry in its usual way,

  cry copper and betrayal,

  cry having faith in what you know,

  * * *

  but you will cross the threshold anyway.

  That Business They Call Utopia, Part Two

  I’ve witnessed that business they call

  building a utopia for so long,

  higher up the Atlantic where yearning to breathe

  free meets committal at the gate.

  I’ve been so frightened, friend.

  They say over here that we catch the other nations’

  colds across the water in the storms, so

  * * *

  often I wonder how to ward them off:

  what warmth but a hearth of good-mornings,

  what vitamins but the scent of fruit

  from neighbors. I’ve witnessed this

  utopia-building business bake bricks from

  screaming, friend, and I’ve seen the masonry

  trade grow on it, shake down big spenders

  * * *

  for iron, for foil tents, for rations,

  for tears with which one churns cement.

  We keep saying that this is like a fantasy novel,

  the ones where there are great houses or great cities

  or great castes, the ones that cast us castaway,

  the ones where the aching children free the phoenix

  from their ribcage and torch it all.

  * * *

  We keep saying it’s a poorly written one,

  because look at the dialogue, look at the

  mise-en-scène, and look, there are so many children,

  but where are all the flames? And friend,

  I have seen the utopia business pick up

  outside your house, I’ve worried about the shape it takes,

  worried about whether the scenes resemble

  * * *

  the shouting on Market Street

  or the shouting on Tragarete Road,

  whether kingdom’s copper foot

  lifted from the waters of war

  and crawled to the shore with

  all its crows. What else can my soft hands

  give but worry? And is saying so even

  my right? But if the stories taught me

  anything about how to prepare

  for this moment, it’s this: everyone has a little

  fire to spare, a neighbor for whom to share it,

  * * *

  someone for whom hope is the phoenix

  still waiting, pecking at our skin while we call it fear.

  And you can have my fire, but first,

  have this other thing:

  I love you, friend, and I love you more with each flambeau-word your tongue waves for your street,

  with each phoenix-word as you throw the weighted consonants against the glass walls of this.

  * * *

  Take both. The stories say when we can spare just those,

  one beside one, two beside two, there’s no wickedness our clasped hands can’t split, even when

  beside is an island in the other direction

  where you cannot hear my heartbird

  crying out to yours, be safe, be safe,

  but burn those bastards’ pillars down.

  And it sings, it sings

  the song the poems say it would sing,

  for you, friend. You.

  Birth, Place

  I made this land myself.

  I put dirt in my own

  mouth and hoped it

  would mature; you made

  manure of the bodies

  of our mothers, asked

  us to chew the remains,

  and on our tongue they

  whispered, Babalú-Ayé,

  make my children potters

  * * *

  of a planet, give them

  farmers’ hands, and turn

  their captors into meat

  for sand.

  I baked the

  soil myself, let the dough

  of it roll in my first language

  so it would taste sweeter,

  coated it in seeds of faith and made

  heat of my heart enough

  for home to cake around me.

  * * *

  Your legacy’s already drowned me,

  you dragged me along water not

  fit for baptism and my brothers

  swam anyway; cold wind

  cracked their bones outside your windows

  and our daughters grinned

  and took it. We asked Yemọja

  what rain would work to water

  a home, and she said

  Whatever sea is in your mouth

  will season your final island.

  * * *

  Know that my landlords are

  greater than yours. I

  made this land myself,

  a recipe written in the heavens

  and taste-tested by ancestors

  and peppered with ashes.

  Shade will one day grow

  in the place where your father’s

  bones once called me low.

  I will plant a time I cannot see

  for children I will not know

  among those bones,

  * * *

  and what grows, laughing,

  will not be as easy to pluck

  as I once was.

  Cthulhu Reminisces Upon The Mighty Sparrow and Lord Melody’s Autographs

  Sometime in the late fifties

  I was just lingering in someone’s fear of flying

  when I noticed them: rum in their cups.

  huddled over scribbled lyrics and laughing

  from Piarco to New York City

  on their way to let Belafonte plant calypso in the Garden.

  I think Melody just figured me ugly,

  some more kind family’s well-meaning man,

  offered a tea-warm smile as his pen skipped paper.

  Sparrow dances a marker over the

  corner of the sleeve of The Slave

  without a glance. Not like he was being cold;

  under his breath he mutters how he’s

  tired of obeah following him.

  I thank them, they nod short,

  and for a moment, they fell quiet.

  Then their muse’s fury flares anew

  in tighter whispers—before I

  could lean to sneak a sight of the results,

  Mister Francisco hums a tune

  and the shadow I came through starts to close…

  postcard 20xx, of our garden and beach

  a thousand sunrises after the miasma, the sea was a glass wine

  wind, but

  we also had other things. when we could dance on soil again, we made dances of everything. you could see it

  in a child’s firm touch of their parent’s hand, in the infinite closeness of lovers’ lips, it is

  * * *

  indomitable space, ruled by wild poinsettia and paphinia

  cristata, thwarting what is difficult.

  the navy blue lapels used to stop us dancing, tanty used

  to say. they’d wait for

  a boy hued like me in his school uniform, or any neighbour

  too small for the

  * * *

  shirt on his back, shout why he was greedy for sun. she say

  they police

  the rations of breath itself to

  each of we by the way the mountains intervene

  * * *

  the wind. but that was a thousand dark clouds ago. because

  my tanty and her tanty chanted our names on the wind, it

  is
owed us well. we water the green-streets, each living

  pavement is

  * * *

  all of ours by the sun, never begging any of us shade in

  private,

  no longer a plantation-right, or a baton’s secret guarded

  property.

  Cthulhu Asks for Kendrick Lamar’s Autograph

  Each sheet fills with sound,

  funk throttles the margins’ throats shut—

  finally something is incomprehensible

  to this, to the size of stars.

  Something worth recognising.

  * * *

  It is noisy, it clashes

  with every corridor of doubt,

  it claims the empty space with a

  pompous shout.

  * * *

  Maybe even too pompous—

  it cheers, takes new names