Be Recorder
Page 3
just charge it to my race card
•
prose v poetry
poetry v nation-state
nation-state v my hoard
my hoard v the dog
the dog v the scorpion
the scorpion v dirt
dirt v lamictal
lamictal v ennui
ennui v blunder
blunder v debt
debt v defect
defect v fucking
fucking v instagram
instagram v art
art v weed
weed v night
night v the wimpy kid
the wimpy kid v disquisition
disquisition v testing
testing v parallelism
parallelism v your textual surface
your textual surface v a glare
a glare v balm
balm v heat
heat v talking
talking v getting
getting v the diurnal clock
the diurnal clock v semester
semester v my tender spirit
my tender spirit v twaddle
twaddle v our wreckage
our wreckage v diagnosis
diagnosis v committee
committee v postfeminism
postfeminism v perimenopause
perimenopause v sentimentality
sentimentality v television
television v us
us v apple
apple v family
family v flight
flight v the bourgeoisie
the bourgeoisie v torpor
torpor v sunshine
sunshine v your company
your company v my duplicity
my duplicity v your ease
your ease v my programming
my programming v your door
your door v my puddles
my puddles v progeny
progeny v prose
•
do you remember
the different world
you wanted for your children
glowing like a nominally capitalist eden
and how good it felt to want the future
a little less glutted with money
because in those days
we wanted to uncover
and overturn I remember
thinking it would be another
world even better than the world
made by the greatest generation
sometimes so much better
I was sure I couldn’t even imagine
all of the ways it would be better
esp. knowing this new world lived
in the edges of my imagination
and required connections into
other people’s edges
to make the whole world new
and raw and hazy but delicious
deeply in the marrow
like the idea of Whitman
or the snowy surface
of the Virgin Mary filling me
with hope when God was clouds
and I was a young naïve nativist
back then when immigration
fueled the fantasy
however improbable in ways we
didn’t know but 100% sure
we expected and back then I was
sure believing that time’s march forward
begat progress vis-à-vis US we would
make it better for everyone
then the they conceptualized
how the idea of a once-better world
would profitably merch hope
and those robber baron’s dollar bills
popped around like a halo
and the they sold the latest gadget
as panacea as lifestyle as campaign
turning our hungry edges into an Oz
machine for printing money
so now we have less than our illusion
less than progress only dregs and
the machine of that illusion emitting
toxins that’s the most recent thing
•
but mommy made me to disrupt
at the hem of her apron weighed down
by the coin of her labor she sold her grace
for tips those days when you could
subsistence live off coins or live almost
a whole lifetime thinking your children
would be lawyers not a why-tress
rocket not candle so for her I hone
myself into a thorn in the giant’s hand
•
we smear the map
with pungency you want
to swab us but you can’t
making us more terrifying
we coagulate and compound
into a virulent fetid stream
bisecting your dreams
we’re those who aren’t there
this land made us
old phantoms
•
phantoms in the pantry
and from the pylon
and hiding in the cricks
of history or Arnold’s
phantom of yourself
the West Side Story
phantom and the phantom
of sisters gone over
the phantom of long-lost moods
dense with speechlessness
the phantoms of squashed ants
and the off-course cricket’s dirge
phantom dream trapped in your pillow
the despair of these phantoms
squared into bigger phantom
splatter of phantoms against the spray
their shadows above your bed
phantom vessels in the sea’s hold
the phantom of streaks in the window
phantom of that recollection
Aragon’s abstract phantom
phantom sister
why hast thou split
into a cavalcade of phantoms
for thou is purest idiom
in my arsenal phantom
infection clotting history
with tattered machination
the phantom of insistence
living there in the bedroom
and again in the kitchen the master’s
spirit in the body’s fleshy ghost
•
Miss America from sea to shining sea
the huddled masses have a concern
there is one of you and all of us
•
I play anchorbaby-opportunist-influx
and traffic my knack for accents and affects and for narrating
childhood fraudulence into artworks
and late at night I vanish into
teacher mother housekeeper
because who am I but a vortex of all those
personas contra class traitor semi-invisible
and forced into a figure defined by hurtling
into ascension the past the present the lie
the reality the parlor game the miniseries
the battle older than me in my helix
•
the animal in the room hisses
and bucks and her boom
squeezes the whole foundation
squeezing all the words out
they twirl a piñata of George
Washington’s head over the animal
it’s filled with grenades of pomp
and fake outrage just like the good old ’90s
when the animal wrongly learned
to avert her eyes tho she eventually
disobeyed which led to pain and regret
lo que no mata engorda
you may have heard that’s
what some did with it
•
and how did trifling bureaucracies
lodge such a vast
root in me
I forget my real vocation
not executive
not supplicant but
stepping back into daughterhood
r
ehearsing insolence to blank walls
the nay vote of the master’s discontent
regaining consciousness
inside of a bullet
•
in my revisionist chronicle
a cabal of my favorite womxn
run the show their hair a wild
network of electricity charging
the new grid and the categories of today
consigned to a container shot into earth’s
belly then cleave again and again into
a giant ovum blood burst in the marrow
of time a throbbing fold because it is
all the body in fecundity and some
switch restores connection and
that’s as far as I get each time
it’s a stunning light to see tho
•
isn’t progress
such a chore when it’s
for the other tribe
sisters and brothers
progress is also
the sledgehammer
for all monolith work
one brick at a time
•
how shall we remind the mathematicians
the politicians and the statisticians
and the megachurch man
and the gentrifying house-flipper
and the executive-garbage people
who hiked up the cost of Daraprim
and EpiPen and the Ponzi scheme
of senator-lobbyists and the propagandists
and the executive branch-corporate shills
and the patriarchal misogynist statesmen
and the Tiki torch-khakis boys
how shall we remind them that want is
the conduit aversion the trick card and
capital is the rabies and impulse
is the fuel that drives it we reject getting
jostled on currents or dismissed by judges
or reduced to hot pepper or into migrant
effigy or dismembered on borders
and razed by the US appetite
for Sinaloan meth in teeny baggies
with skulls on them each a real
human head tossed to the furrowed canals
edging our border lined with the bodies
of journalists and mayors a magical realism
not seen in your mediating literature
when do we stop layering with just post post post
make it the gel we’re in will it have
only symbolic heft or displace our bodies
because of the cannibal factory
releasing only one xenotype at a time free
with purchase of one million shiny objects
shall we write our demands in blood
with our histories cures mythologies curses
or should we develop a victor-approved
version of history how do we transform
their powers do we break them apart
and bury them set them on the shelf
do we push them out on the ice floe or take
away their scepters can we disrupt it
with our word parades or do we let them in
on the plot or do we burn them
•
I have to prepare to live tight and court danger
prepare to live on air I have to stop buying
and watching have to learn to turn hate
into light and uncover I think
dance to disco from the ’70s oil crisis
I have to pull my money
out of the faux middle-class race
I’m separated from my nation
have to teach the kids to turn
off the lights to compost shoot a gun
and make agitational film
resist the lure
they will have to be tougher
so I have to mine for toughness
for me for the children
for their middle age
to accept it was long-coming
long con
tears are blood
act accordingly
have to overlook my invented
horizontal rival remember urgency
have to live against the wall
into the future into the disturbance
have to return to a marrow
of language I have to refuse to be
what they are to be what they’ll do
will avenge will disturb
revise and filter don’t want to
still have to
•
this new disturbance
could gather volition
and mass humanist buy-in
where I am alone and alert
where I’ve thickened my soul
by a severe scare quotes
artist mastermind installed
by the state to keep us docile
and ashamed which we do for
a hot second then stop and
become presumptuous even while
circled by junkyard dogs if it stops us
we are weak if it shapes us we
are what they name us
•
what is your origin where did you suffer what is your affinity group
how are you acquainted with industry what will you bring to our guild
what are the qualities of a good serf what is your mission in life
and could you sell me this instance what is the last pornography that repulsed you
can you talk about your research into the unsolvable how would you
feign a diverse audience is a reader a client did customers occur to you
as an outcome what are three positive strains in you does content
drive you into the market does blunder drive you to work on a regular basis
when can you start with selective memory is this the racket you had planned
was this your natal force are you an open boomtown or a care professional
what animal rules the roost does that animal work as aphorism
pure revelation or dispatch from the front lines where is the monolith’s fortress
and who is its benefactor have you made anything good with our outrage
or built an endless abstract war will an underclass hunger qualify for your attention
or will you have to track down their legitimacy yourself can I expect
a chronicle of the moment or is it fraught with the lyric therefore fraught
with the vulgar density of people is that the hitch aesthetically
thus ethically does it seem impossible the desire for such validation
or could you break free and record be recorder
•
let’s admit to our own complicity release into
the wound because imagine it’s like a rose
blossom of scarred red tissue not beautiful
but layers and layers of lesions
layered over with more scar then more wound
over it and the edges are brittle from years
and years of wounding can you see it red white
purple orange yellow milk tears blue black
the colors of everywhere so why can’t
we circle the wound all of us circle
it with balms and prayer with linked hands
around it a common song in Esperanto for instance
the resurgence of babel but as one braided
bellow the rope that leads to heaven
rousing the wound which could vibrate
and diminish into lesser scar a release like opening
a fist of morning glory but of broken skin like
a giant fractal spreading across the ice
it would be the end of one era the beginning
of another like the end of money or the end
of time except more difficult or impossible tho we
wouldn’t televise or at least no commercial breaks
we’d be taking off the masks and
once they were off
and some folks might finally
be in the seats we dreamt of when plotting
this insurrection against the wound and for
the animal the fiefdom might have been your aunt’s
or your father’s and we apologize for disrupting
lineage but from where I sit the seas and the deserts
and islands are the source from which my sisters
and brothers ascend in their ceaseless
force and filled with light you go first then
I’ll follow you say it and I’ll repeat it and you will
repeat it and yours and mine and ours
will repeat it and it’ll become the human drone
over the world that trembles out the clouds
tumbles them to wash over the cities wash
out our mouths the consonance draining out
into the sewers of our historical consciousness
and the new city rises from the bits of what
was the letters are shaped like us
THREE • Birthright
IN REMEMBRANCE OF THEIR LABORS
What is the nature of the brown artist’s desire for disruption? My legacy: a long lineage of fuck-up hustlers, mostly on my father’s side. On my mother’s side: civil servants: three generations of accountants for the state. On my father’s: scamps, scam artists, pimps, criminals: perfect models for destabilization.
From all sides: studious and intense labor, relentless work, under-the-table exchange.
I’m a node of various dark and light powers, first generation emitting energy from the first world. In remembrance of their labors, honest and corrupt, I infiltrate the creative class by squatting in its traditions.
This in remembrance of my impetuous mother and father’s jet plane ride into the ’60s maelstrom, and bussing tables and a tiny apartment in the Bronx and knowing only the English words for all-things-restaurant. I serve thee for thine labor is my staircase.
The frivolity of poetry, layers of frivolity disguised as labor or vice versa. Poetry is useless until we rot from inside when we don’t have words.
Emancipatory lyric poetry. Deregulated lyric poetry. Lyric poetry with workboots. The lyric poetry of garbage, of kitsch, of Marianism, of cockroach and placenta and dirty fingernails. In remembrance of their very deep-kneed and hand-gnarling labors, I declare the ocean Latinx, its blue surface the tongue of our abuelas forming the rough syllables of our Americanized ideals.
In remembrance of my father’s belief in text, the house filled with books of striving. I devour the argot of the oppressor and US opened me in How to Win Friends and Influence People. My favorite story was about the boy who befriended a czar who then married the boy’s mother. It told me there would be a game.