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Kingston, Jamaica Lamps have begun to light as evening, alluvial, fills every crevice in the courtyard, fills Devon House, alone with its marble columns, its verandas and esplanades empty, the plantation gone, and the fields, the courtyard a tourist attraction now: glass ashtrays etched with boys too large to be clambering coconut trees, statuettes of women too smooth to be burdened with baskets of fruit on their heads, stoneware with doctor birds captured in the shallowest bas-relief, key rings carved in the rough shape of the island; and now even the hummingbirds are spoken of as jewels where once everyone drowned in leaf-filtered sunlight.

Coming to Sumer and the tamarisks on the river I Ezra with unsettling love rifled the mud and wattle huts for recent mournings with gold leaves and lapis lazuli beads in the neat braids loosening from the skull Looking through the wattles to the sun I said It has rained some here in this place unless snow falls heavily in the hills to do this The floor was smooth with silt and river weeds hanging gray on the bent reeds spoke saying Everything is even here as you can see Firing the huts I abandoned the unprofitable poor unequal even in the bone to disrespect and casual with certainty watched an eagle wing as I went to king and priest

We have done what we wanted. We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry of each other, and we have welcomed grief and called ruin the impossible habit to break. And now we are here. The dinner is ready and we cannot eat. The meat sits in the white lake of its dish. The wine waits. Coming to this has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away. We have no heart or saving grace, no place to go, no reason to remain.

Just look, ’tis quarter past six, love— And not even the fires are caught; Well, you know I must be at the office— But, as usual, the breakfast ’ll be late. Now hurry and wake up the children; And dress them as fast as you can; ‘Poor dearies,’ I know they’ll be tardy, Dear me, ‘what a slow, poky man!’ Have the tenderloin broiled nice and juicy— Have the toast browned and buttered all right; And be sure you settle the coffee: Be sure that the silver is bright. When ready, just run up and call me— At eight, to the office I go, Lest poverty, grim, should o’ertake us— ‘’Tis bread and butter,’ you know. The bottom from stocks may fall out, My bonds may get below par; Then surely, I seldom could spare you A nickel, to buy a cigar. All ready? Now, while I am eating, Just bring up my wheel to the door; Then wash up the dishes; and, mind now, Have dinner promptly at four; For tonight is our Woman’s Convention, And I am to speak first, you know— The men veto us in private, But in public they shout, ‘That’s so.’ So ‘by-by’ – In case of a rap, love, Before opening the door, you must look; O! how could a civilized woman Exist, without a man cook.

In Tucson when a university student goes home she might leave her desk and a chair, a bookcase outside her cave with a sign, “Take me.” And who could resist heat radiating over furniture like a mirage? You hoist an old Victrola into your pickup and ratchet up a new song. You start that life in the West, invent a past, and when that tune winds down, it’s okay to put out, “Take me.” What do we have in life but comings and goings?

A bridge is a passage between two banks. On Saturdays both banks are closed. A well is located in a wall of sound. But space is not the stake and suddenly both travellers fall in. Now draw a line between some water and their eyes. Express it as the border of a reservoir. The term ears stands ready to attack. Attach it then repeat the phrase my body lives inside a closed shed. The nose with this noise invents a scale. The cottage is attempts and tries to break at random or at noon a forest hidden by a single tree. Narrative dilates sporadic or clairvoyant in a place where bed becomes the meaning of the rest. Now say embrace me. Motors trivialize. Eighty-six windows show the noun to be a house. The heart is now a hole in space that falls across and leaves a certain number. Forget the thirds in this and the silhouettes change place. You can no longer have a choice. You start at zero by the church called word in the forest by a beach beyond the sea between a fingernail at the moment logic begins. Basic liquids add a soup. Now change it. Write down I can no longer state a model is at work. Then make filters for each body. Draw all the composition off. Forbid readers to leave. This sea as a mixture and the sand relating questions to the horizontal movements of a prebiotic plan. You are now discovering that concrete form involves both circulation and the clinamen. Start to weave and you’ll connect this space. Now try to say the eye is paradoxical so that all future lines repeat a plate. Nothing is narrative. Now alter it. The equator drops and float upstream. A pluralist sidewalk remains. Go back to the start. The Saturdays stay close to a catastrophic separation. The bridge is now a son who kills the father at a crossroad. In the well of the week drops the son’s name. Add wings to it. Now set out all the other links to constitute a set of probable ideas. The crevice of the lip connects a writing that’s as still as ink. This final switch is exactly what’s happening. The constant factor in a cloud.

Old as I am This candle I light For you today May be the last one Of your afterlife With me, your son— With me you die twice.

Last night this commercial came on TV. It was this white lady making a nice dinner for her husband. She made him some baked chicken with potatoes and gravy and some kind of greens —not collards, but they still looked real good. Everything looked so delicious, I just wanted to reach into that television and snatch a plate for myself. He gave her a kiss and then a voice came on saying He'll love you for it and then the commercial went off. I sat on Miss Edna's scratchy couch wondering if that man and woman really ate that food or just threw it all away. Now Ms. Marcus wants to know why I wrote that the lady is white and I say because it's true. And Ms. Marcus says Lonnie, what does race have to do with it, forgetting that she asked us to use lots of details when we wrote. Forgetting that whole long talk she gave yesterday about the importance of description! I don't say anything back to her, just look down at my arm. It's dark brown and there's a scab by my wrist that I don't pick at if I remember not to. I look at my knuckles. They're real dark too. Outside it's starting to rain and the way the rain comes down — tap, tapping against the window —gets me to thinking. Ms. Marcus don't understand some things even though she's my favorite teacher in the world. Things like my brown, brown arm. And the white lady and man with all that good food to throw away. How if you turn on your TV, that's what you see —people with lots and lots of stuff not having to sit on scratchy couches in Miss Edna's house. And the true fact is alotta those people are white. Maybe it's that if you're white you can't see all the whiteness around you.

I am here for a very particular reason: to buy a 6-pack of beer and berries out of season all for you, i did it all for you I noticed an oil spill on my drive past the bay, emergency broadcast on the radio —What do you have to say? all for you, i did it all for you You chopped down the plant that used to grow my pants, resurrected it in Indonesia like a blow-up doll with amnesia all for you, i did it all for you Poor people once lived here but you flooded the valley with psilocybin carcinogens, and forced the kids into shooting galleries all for you, i did it all for you You gave poor people jobs then you forced them to act like robots lining up for a real live heart attack, made them take apart their futures then you sold the parts back, repurposed the sutures to close a robocaller’s rap all for you, i did it all for you You got children in slums to make things that break, your unspoken credo— “If it lasts, it’s fake.” But you were there first when we were dying of thirst, with a pint of chilled water each, for me, my wife and two daughters, and even a kewpie doll and a tiny stuffed puppy —for my wife some paper slippers, for me, a stuffed yuppie —You saw every decision that I would make first, and you did get there first when we were dying of thirst every decision i make is part yours, every step i take, i take on your floor You mangled my fingers, polluted my streams, screamed in my face, closed deals over my dreams all for you, i did it all for you (and now it fades out, “The Commodity Sings to its Beloved” song. They’ll say it was a good idea done wrong —“They should have got a bigger budget, done it as a singalong.”)

The American common is no collective or princedom but privacies of need & pleasure as they intersect in public spaces, tho the insufferable powers that be breed their plots behind our backs, thinking us witless, seemingly blind to their afflicted intentions, just a bunch of demographic motormouths & screw-ups to be targeted by commodities traders & search engines— a marketing niche for every need, stereotypes tagged by algorithms—here is a typical team of baton twirlers in an airport bar, each of them clad in foxy red track suits & tuned-in to the dollhouse stimulations of pigeon-talking sales reps;there is a previously undetected aggregation of retirees, evangelical camp kids, kickass bowlers, and mothy nuns in starched wimples, for whom the news of the day means the aging boy-man Hugh Grant's fear of double chins—neither of these or any other data dump entirely false, but so narrow-minded sometimes as to lose sight of us entirely: the midtown lady in Capris, a four-square surgeon off-duty & headed out to play poker, the plumber fly-fishing by the river— a sky of twilight slate now—not a word written on it.