Poemunity — your poem community

chuuch /church [pronounced without the r. the r is the hump on our backs. too much to weigh /wait. imagine replacing the r with u. the cupping is softer. all the things it holds. it often sounds like ahh. round and complete. it all comes together. like home.] from the renowned amen! meaning let it be. or so it is. or so may have it. and take into agreement. this the stamp. the let it be said and sold. the solidarity screaming from the stem of our spouts. 
this is the yes. used in positions of incognegro. the screech beyond the never-lands of our blocks. posted and protecting. remember the code.
 often known as i peep game. or the never ending i’m on it, bro. 
 closing the deal. the celebration of i see you. welcome to my memory for another day. let the house of our bodies be grateful. for our sacrifices have not killed us. yet. said like a vaccine. the awkwardness dancing on your lip before
 your words fall and ruin the show. this can also be the broken promise. the text you know you won’t reply to. the person you 
 drag your heart for with no supplies left to clean. this is sometimes the last stake. the call of i don’t understand, but imma figure this shit out. the choir is singing and you can’t understand anything 
 sang. you sing. for the house is still bouncing. ace boom cooling. this is not to be confused with sending off. it’s the most honest
 thing we are unsure of. for every house is not covered. so we 
cover our prayer with a this is it. this is real and our lives. we do
 not agree to this condition of our well-being. blast and break our 
cinder blocks like tambourines. we weave the stories together. thank and talk through our teeth. for we know. we understand. we 
light the sky. shake up with god and find the move. keep the key.
 keep it pushing.

Have any of you, passers-by, Had an old tooth that was an unceasing discomfort? Or a pain in the side that never quite left you? Or a malignant growth that grew with time? So that even in profoundest slumber There was shadowy consciousness or the phantom of thought Of the tooth, the side, the growth? Even so thwarted love, or defeated ambition, Or a blunder in life which mixed your life Hopelessly to the end, Will like a tooth, or a pain in the side, Float through your dreams in the final sleep Till perfect freedom from the earth-sphere Comes to you as one who wakes Healed and glad in the morning!

1 Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of stone, my age Old, burnished and bruised, my hair lingering, my hand caked, spongy as November my dear Relentless, my dear Aging, your voice tinny, dissonant As Stein shot through decades of war and Fortrel, cocktails on the hour, Zeppelins over Piccadilly, bombing blindly in the fog. Dear Skin, dear Tobacco Mouth my refusal, my merely geographic, my fibrous strings for you: your Abundant wit, your lack of shadow and still joy nosing the air. Each moment Stretches toward you, your dry feet: I carried them, pumiced and peppery Laid them where regret is a biscuit thing to lean upon and sweeten, My hour of you, my cursive thoughts, a pulpit beating under these ribs. 2 Dear Time, you swallowed us whole, swallowed us lovely, sharp as bones Crimping sadly under foot my benign, my flotsam and crabs thin as leaves Your smoothing, your sinking in. Mornings or mooring, or wallowing Jericho: tapioca air indolent. I am still there, supple and driftwood, you lovely, You loved me, your memory dark and west, thoughts like tugboats stitching The horizon, you pulling me, my pudding, my thin crustacean, sideways In the late afternoon, your gaze, having so soon forgotten the sharpness Of mornings, the bite of your look serrating the hour: my treasures, all Of them, for the pleasure of that slice once more, of our dangling, You and me, the lot of us in some car, driving some hour, mapless. 3 Under a spiderweb, a tire, slouched: flat, sad-lipped, I think of Newton Of the original apple, all of these clones since, all of these scentless Descents. I shake my glass, shake again, melted suffixes tinkling; observe All things natural: foliage unfurling like old bills, wryly betraying Your habits, like the dog who digs and rubs, the dog who whines, who Paws and circles, you trace. Why is pain so much better than nothing? Or The mark of it more understandable? Why is saying nothing so much better? Your one-liner like blossoms, uplifting, your currents strap me to air, yes I guess there is a little texture up here, and oxygen pure as baby’s toes Which if I recall, are sweet as kernels of corn, if I recall so long ago. 4 To arrive is practice, conversation or conversion, a story over a field My Sweet, of concrete or whispering, furrows of a path no longer, not Sure, was there, and snow combed in curlicues and dog ears a zigzag Through January. Sure you are witty, but are you any less romantic? In my remembering, I have undone all my beliefs, it is a luxury to lay Unencumbered here, or there, the bones flexed with tendons, the Spine like a seahorse, the heart far from a cliche unless beating is Innocent, though innocence is not as supple as you think, nor as flexible, Nor as perfumed, nor convenient, or even clean: between things regret Gathers force. I remember that day: it was cold and the coffee tepid. 5 The small red balloons like thumbprints, waves green as the brush of Cedar, the wind lapping your hoodie, blind strings tap the air, camera Bobbing like a dog’s tail. Such lightness, the dog heading off, all The dogs of English Bay angling off-leash. I would follow backward, Lay old maps on your white sheets, so sincere, I am in earnest for you: We won’t regret having not yet knit our acrid puns and jaded barbs, nor Having the wind slip in under our belt loops, though I gently refuse Gor-Tex, and you bet I will not concede the game. Those small red Balloons like tulips in your eyes specs of amber, an amulet, an avatar, My thoughts of you fully indexed, ready to step into.

I heard a child, a little under four years old, when asked what was meant by being in good spirits, answer, “It is laughing, talking, and kissing.” —CHARLES DARWIN, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 1.   WALDORF-ASTORIA EUPHORIA, THE JOY OF BIG CITIES Joy, when intense, leads to various purposeless movements—to dancing about, clapping the hands, stamping, etc.

Here was no place for illumination the cotton dust thick window-strained light. The metal squall drowned what could not be shouted everything geared warping and filling. Though surely there were some times that he paused my grandfather thinking This is my life and catching himself before he was caught lost wages or fingers the risk of reflection. Or another recalled in those reckoning moments remembering the mountains the hardscrabble farm where a workday as long bought no guarantee of money come fall full bellies in winter. To earn extra pay each spring he would climb the mill's water tower repaint the one word. That vowel heavy word defined the horizon a word my grandfather could not even read.

Beauty is my irreparable and today I became geometric. A faux linear figure that distills a skip trace of First principles. In a whiteout of Atlantic snow banging stars into the femoral vein of Euclid while rows of lavender circuits, all porous, surrounded me. I genuflected before the hospital parking of my father’s jaundice, for I am a good daughter of the colony. The colony which begot the immortal heart of the markets. Resource nursed all young bucks of the florets, a liquidity I should service or else receive a lesser dessert. With my smudge cleanse at the ready I find myself dispensing with the usual future haunt of stability; a survival signaling my relationship to time, or I’m out of it, entirely. Chanting hell as hair veils my face as if this is a Western. Come polygon and I circumvent the disaster,do not disturb my circles. Holy I went, holy all around my head, the holy I am went careening down the back stairs of this low-rise rental. Striated by the pinnacle light of this city that has my blood pooled purple at the center of its gravity. You can scan the ground from overhead for death pits. I read this on the internet when I was dehydrated, lonely, and afraid. Office plants all broad-leafed repositories for cognition’s patent heart. I’ve gone and been abominable. A column extended from the top of my head into heaven. At the edges of my system an Anishinabek or Indo-European projection of words my nerves could translate into the crawl space of animal magnetism. White pine verticals send us up as a stomach pumped by filial love. Oh, inconsequent curb of my street I refuse to kneel, this day like any other, a cousin charged with trafficking. Still waiting to be ordained, I make mask of our features that are retreating. Plush pockets of rust about another falsehood of water, a creek that pleats. I’ve gone and got a blister. That summer a black bear’s muzzle was coated in shellac from the aerosol can she bit through on my mother’s porch. A half-century after my grandmother’s mother said, don’t ever shoot a black bear, they are my people. So I continue to speak more than this mortuary sunrise where I am only just alive. Boozhoo, today is over.

I So you have swept me back, I who could have walked with the live souls above the earth, I who could have slept among the live flowers at last; so for your arrogance and your ruthlessness I am swept back where dead lichens drip dead cinders upon moss of ash; so for your arrogance I am broken at last, I who had lived unconscious, who was almost forgot; if you had let me wait I had grown from listlessness into peace, if you had let me rest with the dead, I had forgot you and the past. II Here only flame upon flame and black among the red sparks, streaks of black and light grown colourless; why did you turn back, that hell should be reinhabited of myself thus swept into nothingness? why did you glance back? why did you hesitate for that moment? why did you bend your face caught with the flame of the upper earth, above my face? what was it that crossed my face with the light from yours and your glance? what was it you saw in my face? the light of your own face, the fire of your own presence? What had my face to offer but reflex of the earth, hyacinth colour caught from the raw fissure in the rock where the light struck, and the colour of azure crocuses and the bright surface of gold crocuses and of the wind-flower, swift in its veins as lightning and as white. III Saffron from the fringe of the earth, wild saffron that has bent over the sharp edge of earth, all the flowers that cut through the earth, all, all the flowers are lost; everything is lost, everything is crossed with black, black upon black and worse than black, this colourless light. IV Fringe upon fringe of blue crocuses, crocuses, walled against blue of themselves, blue of that upper earth, blue of the depth upon depth of flowers, lost; flowers, if I could have taken once my breath of them, enough of them, more than earth, even than of the upper earth, had passed with me beneath the earth; if I could have caught up from the earth, the whole of the flowers of the earth, if once I could have breathed into myself the very golden crocuses and the red, and the very golden hearts of the first saffron, the whole of the golden mass, the whole of the great fragrance, I could have dared the loss. V So for your arrogance and your ruthlessness I have lost the earth and the flowers of the earth, and the live souls above the earth, and you who passed across the light and reached ruthless; you who have your own light, who are to yourself a presence, who need no presence; yet for all your arrogance and your glance, I tell you this: such loss is no loss, such terror, such coils and strands and pitfalls of blackness, such terror is no loss; hell is no worse than your earth above the earth, hell is no worse, no, nor your flowers nor your veins of light nor your presence, a loss; my hell is no worse than yours though you pass among the flowers and speak with the spirits above earth. VI Against the black I have more fervour than you in all the splendour of that place, against the blackness and the stark grey I have more light; and the flowers, if I should tell you, you would turn from your own fit paths toward hell, turn again and glance back and I would sink into a place even more terrible than this. VII At least I have the flowers of myself, and my thoughts, no god can take that; I have the fervour of myself for a presence and my own spirit for light; and my spirit with its loss knows this; though small against the black, small against the formless rocks, hell must break before I am lost; before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.

Who knows more of gods than I? Deities defied, not the first time. I scan scraps of Abraxas, Rap along to Pac; rip Big’s Faith, My skin infection scratched, an itch With which I cannot live. I pray For nightmares —Dana Dane— to stop Effluvial rainfall. Oh, here comes The wet stuff. Here come I. Up the train, off the 7, up The stairs to Vernon. The church? St. Mary’s. 49th, 49th, 49th. El ay si mac and cheese. IPA. A walk across Pulaski Hump to Greenpoint. It’s post-pop Hipster, so my jeans press Just one plum to my leg. The Dionysus to the other, The Apollo orbiting right, left. In the middle, Bazooka Joe. It is, after all, so cold (the plum). Baller status. Church bells chime, The chimera within. A right on Driggs, Parallel to Bedford. Ratty chains, skulls patch a pylon Maze of bubblegum dusk. Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant, The livest one.

Evans? Yes, many a time I came down his bare flight Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen With its wood fire, where crickets sang Accompaniment to the black kettle’s Whine, and so into the cold Dark to smother in the thick tide Of night that drifted about the walls Of his stark farm on the hill ridge. It was not the dark filling my eyes And mouth apalled me; not even the drip Of rain like blood from the one tree Weather-tortured. It was the dark Silting the veins of that sick man I left stranded upon the vast And lonely shore of his bleak bed.

Close to the gates of Paradise I flee; The night is hot and serpents leave their beds, And slide along the dark, crooking their heads,— My God, my God, open the gates to me! My eyes are burning so I cannot see; My feet are bleeding and I suffer pain; Let me come in on the cool grass again— My God, my God, open the gates to me! I ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, And was cast out into the barren drouth; And since – the awful taste within my mouth! My God, my God, open the gates to me! Am I shut out for all eternity? I do repent me of my one black sin, With prayers and tears of blood . . . Let me come in! My God, my God, open the gates to me! Let me come in where birds and flowers be; Let me once more lie naked in the grass That trembles when the long wind-ripples pass! Lord God, Lord God, open the gates to me!