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after Tafisha Edwards To disappear Black girls at a low volume of sustained public panic is to insinuate the inconstancy of Black girls. The disposability of Black girls who are prone to disappearance. A body bag somewhere waits with little hoopla about its lot. Absence becomes the lot of Black girls. _________ will eventually accept as fact that absence becomes a lot of Black girls. In what becomes the normal day-to-day, Black girls are harder to find, _________ would think first, not that there are few attempts to find them. The question isn’t whether Black girls often go missing. If no one else, Black girls miss each other. _________  would be remiss to not recognize how everything is made less in the absence of Black girls, if _________ could miss what _________ have never been required to recognize, such as: Unlike missing Black girls, taking Black girls is a Western custom. It seems likely that such a statement will soon appear inaccurate: the white space in new textbook editions will have nothing to say about it, if the white spaces behind those textbooks have anything to say about it. That Black girls are quintessential American palimpsests is not a question but an anxiety. _________ would rather forget that Black girls were made receptacles for what the authors of Liberty and Independence would not speak. That Liberty and Independence were imaginable only in the absent-presence of taken Black girls, enslaved Black girls, Black girls on whom a foundational economic system so depended that white men would kill each other and take taken Black girls. The constancy of Black girls is someone’s anxiety. The soil is thick with hidden Black girls, the myth that only quiet Black girls are worthwhile Black girls. The soil turns as _________  turn away from loud Black girls and their cacophonic insistence on Black girls. _________ have not insisted enough upon the fact of Black girls, are often loudly shocked to find Black girls disappeared. Loud, unsustainable shock has a way of disappearing Black girls. Outrage, too, has a way of being disappeared.

Talking like Pushkin to his horse, I climb into thick equestrian aesthetics. I’m horseman and veterinarian in one on an estate of troubled youth, I am an aristocratic fop, hello, galloping at full gallop shooting at treetops, yahoo to you Sir in treble multiplication, I know about stallions and I’m out of here to the city soon, I must meet N. or K., I forget which, and then the zisters C. Sorry, I mean the sisters Z. My sideburns incinerate the furniture in the salon of Y. I do not care for C++ , for I live in the nineteenth century. I barely lived through math at the Lyc é e. I’m now dans une boutique. Vous ne parlez pas fran ç ais? Merde, vous ê tes alors cr é tin, mon vieux monsieur le barbecue! What are you a Volga Tatar or something? Actually I’ve never been to Kazan but I wanna go some day, maybe when the emperor exiles me. You look familiar, I know you from somewhere. So what brings you to St. Petersburg on this particular twist of the century? Lozenges of the imagination climb reflected in the Neva of the sky and in the sky of the Neva and farther along the Nevkas, and the stars, the stars shine viscerally like old duel scars anticipated. I am stuck at home. I’ll never see you, Paris, London, Rome. Adrenal memory flows and gels and burns, acting in combination with my sideburns. I’ll show you some transculture. Gospoda, do you understand any Russian, ah? Nyet? Damn, then I must speak to you in English.

Here, at your feet, all the gargoyles of heaven— kneel upon your furnace, their tongues worship you. You can love only one, the one you rest your hand upon, his head so sharp, his sulphur breath...Even now a saint makes his way up your steps, on his knees he is coming, he will find you, with his sword he will kill the beasts, all of them— he swears this will save you. • Earlier, a deer stood by the side of the road deciding whether or not to kill me. I cannot blame her, I cannot blame anyone—many animals were hurt in the production of this book just as many trees were hurt & all the clouds. Open any book & the cloud above you bursts into flame, you know this & yet nothing stops you, the sky stuck to the end of your finger as you point to it. • This is how it works—the master does not bow before his servant, he does not stand naked before her robes, his hands are empty yet he does not offer— not even a cupful—of his emptiness, how could he? How could the world then keep spinning? He made his money (as they say) the old-fashioned way, meaning he earned it, meaning slaves, meaning go fuck yourself. • Geometry deals with properties of space. Figs (a "multiple fruit") are like strawberries only inside out—its skin is a receptacle. Saint Francis didn't eat for forty days, until his body erupted & now we call it ecstasy. Years later Frankenstein found a way to raise the dead.Friend, his creation mutters,flower. • A storm will come the radio says find a ditch & lie facedown in it. Find your ditch & lie facedown & pray we will all lie down & pray after all there's only so many places to hide. We all need help the land is vast & dense & full of eyes & so many flowers the soil inside us is darker than oil lie down in it & pray. • Remember: it's not that everything has to look like something else, or even remind you of something else—everything is something else. This is the story we've been telling ourselves since we could speak.Possess nothing, Francis says.Do good everywhere. No one believes those wings will lift you.

Prostrating before the golden figure Against disinclination…later in the day… All that remains…the extremely brittle foliage… Abated, the thunder…our golden figure… Her ugly hair held back by a pin…frenzied Rushed down the forested hill that isolates sun Highly explosive, flickering, foiling of your heightening hushed Nick in the blue thing Along negligence Chagrin Of the maidens Bleeds Shackled as sharp complication Being as it were Absorbed into Myth Whiten, whitening Or white on white display That play That combusted On stage Romulus & Remus The Janus figure From Zaire (curtain)

For RWT the other day i was thinking about the term pyramid scheme, and why they called it pyramid scheme and not triangle scheme and i asked you what you thought you thought it added a certain gravitas, and linked the idea of 
economic prosperity with some of history’s greatest architectural achievements unconsciously suggesting a silent wealth of gold and heat a triangle is two dimensional, and therefore a less striking mental image than the idea of a third dimension of financial fraud which is how many dimensions of financial fraud the term pyramid scheme suggests but i had to pause for a second at the financial fraud part because it occurred to me i didn’t know what pyramid schemes really were i knew they had something to do with people getting money from nothing like the person at the top of the pyramid scheme, or more accurately triangle scheme, acquires a number of investors and takes their money and then pays the first lot of investors with the money from another bunch of investors and so on and so forth all the way to the bottom of the triangle or pyramid face which is the kind of stupid thing that happens if you keep your money in a pyramid and not a bank account although if you ask me banks are the real pyramid schemes after all or was love the real pyramid scheme? i can’t remember maybe it’s better to keep your money in a pyramid than a bank and i should shop around and compare the interest rates on different pyramids maybe i should open up a savings pyramid with a whole bunch of trapdoors and malarias to keep the financial anthropologists i mean bankers out my emeralds cooling under the ground like beautiful women’s eyes i think this was supposed to be a metaphor for something but i can’t remember where i was going with it and now it’s been swept away by the winds of whatever but knowing me, it was probably love that great dark blue sex hope that keeps coming true that cartoon black castle with a single bird flying over it i don’t know where this poem ends how far below the sand but it’s still early evening and you and I are a little drunk you answer the phone you pour me a drink i know you hate the domestic in poetry but you should have thought of that before you invited me to move in with you i used to think arguments were the same as honesty i used to think screaming was the same as passion i used to think pain was meaningful i no longer think pain is meaningful i never learned anything good from being unhappy i never learned anything good from being happy either the way i feel about you has nothing to do with learning it has nothing to do with anything but i feel it down in the corners of my sarcophagus i feel it in my sleep even when i am not thinking about you you are still pouring through my blood, like fire through an abandoned hospital ward these coins are getting heavy on my eyes it has been a great honor and privilege to love you it has been a great honor and privilege to eat cold pizza on your steps at dawn love is so stupid: it’s like punching the sun and having a million gold coins rain down on you which you don’t even have to pay tax on because sun money is free money and i’m pretty sure there are no laws about that but i would pay tax because i believe that hospitals and education and the arts should be publicly funded even this poem when i look at you, my eyes are two identical neighborhood houses on fire when i look at you my eyes bulge out of my skull like a dog in a cartoon when i am with you an enormous silence descends upon me and i feel like i am sinking into the deepest part of my life we walk down the street, with the grass blowing back and forth i have never been so happy

pyramidal, its certain form certain it is a form    wittgenstein or anyone can think of a stag in their mind but not be able to shoot that stag and where is all that everlovin antimatter that matter supposedly co-creates? at the end of the dream, the poem at the end of everything    what else, the end    sighs sor juana the doors have an 11-minute song called ‘the end’ which feels serious when you are 11 and stupid six or eight months later    nor did I offer up my own dream which was a meadow in my cup    meadowtation ha ha ha the ship kissed the sands of galenic shores at the buttressed end of my dream where spectacles do not fear to interpose long fallen out of  the mouth of vishnu    so long gabriel so long usen now the instrument of my reflection no longer necessary since the inside is the out    and I’ve jiggered the mechanism such that my jacket’s always dry & clean & my cock is hard only when I want    no more embarrassing sublunarities    and my cunt is wet just as my lover thinks of fucking it    cities appear    golden to my gaze    a figure empyreal    arises in shadow    long for this world    aching on the threshold of my upturned arse and my one ways and means, lilified cloak enmaned w/ tresses, baldly dignified, the cloak was regal it did not speak, yet diogenes leapt on it, yet the trumpets pointed one direction    entrained to a kind of roseate beam the same pink beam philip k. dick saw emanating from the fish necklace around the neck of that delivery girl he saw in his doorway after he’d had his wisdom teeth removed that same beam that triangulated w/ arcturus, aka alpha boötis, to flash up and hit it smack in the third eye till it and we and we are bent sobbing, having given up our library, having died of the plague and worse, having vowed never again to write w/ pen and ink having inscribed yo la peor, I the worst, in blood on the back of a dirty pamphlet, but oh what unmiserable mind is this    no me miserum    noli me tangere nothing miserable    nothing touches me

You’re gonna strike the match— You’re gonna strike it— Flame the bank up into pods of fire, be a masterhand— — And someone said, Gasoline. Someone said, We have to change the images inside their heads, said Gasoline? And motor oil, he bought at a mini-mart. — And the cat said Don’t even though it was dead and the squirrel said Don’t and the little dog missing an eye and a leg even though they were dead, said Don’t Don’t but you did it anyway. And someone said, That boy is sick— And someone said, It was kind of pretty when you didn’t know what it was from the road. — Hours now, by the trashed banks, counting the colored glass— Brown for beer. Green for the fizzy water, clear for anything and tail lights smashed, cars mucked like big cats trapped in tar, who ate the flesh right off their legs, if they were lighter they could hurry home, they could float on home— killed cat dead at the end of your stick, who could do that, shot in the head— Like in the shows where the cop cleans up his town, then the ambulance comes for the drowned. — You felt bad, so you did it. You thought it was pretty, so you did it again. You felt charged and buoyant as you picked your way home to the blue-lit fatherless den— So you did it again. The BB’ed mutt, leg smashed, home-bum toasting you with his beer as you dragged it to the sludgy bank, the match, the gas, the pile of tires someone had dumped,were you dumped? you had asked after another one left, and she had slapped you, and slapped— You were an ambulance, you could see she had drowned— Like in the shows where the warrior collects his dead and brings them to the shore, to burn them in their body-boats, release the spiritual — smoke— And the parents said, Didn’t he have a house key around his neck, didn’t he have a pager, an electrical tether to a list of chores and a stocked refrigerator— And the teachers said Yes, but what were the images inside his head, they see it and they make it be— And you put it in a tire, your viking boat, you set it on fire and it kept afloat as it sailed down the river— to the heaven of not being here.

Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak. This is America calling: The mirroring of state to state, Of voice to voice on the wires, The force of colloquial greetings like golden Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze. In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives; The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio. If this is the way it is let’s leave, They agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins, Gradually accelerating until the gyrating fans of suburbs Enfolding the darkness of cities are remembered Only as a recurring tic. And midway We meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its Being able to stop us in the headlong night Toward the nothing of the coast. At Bolinas The houses doze and seem to wonder why through the Pacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull. Why be hanging on here? Like kites, circling, Slipping on a ramp of air, but always circling? But the variable cloudiness is pouring it on, Flooding back to you like the meaning of a joke. The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves: An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed And only partially designed. How are we to inhabit This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing, As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are, In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet Unrealized projects, and a strict sense Of time running out, of evening presenting The tactfully folded-over bill? And we fit Rather too easily into it, become transparent, Almost ghosts. One day The birds and animals in the pasture have absorbed The color, the density of the surroundings, The leaves are alive, and too heavy with life. A long period of adjustment followed. In the cities at the turn of the century they knew about it But were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it But all the fathers returning home On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it: The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it. One day we thought of painted furniture, of how It just slightly changes everything in the room And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today, It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets Out in the middle west toward the end of summer, The look of wanting to back out before the argument Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything? That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit And not just the major events but the whole incredible Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off, Channeling itself into history, will unroll As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room, And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze, Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of. The parade is turning into our street. My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic Features of this instant belong here. The land Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December. The hunch is it will always be this way, The look, the way things first scared you In the night light, and later turned out to be, Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity To what you and they wanted to become: No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unravelling Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.

Where analgesia may be found to ease the infinite, minute scars of the day; What final interlude will result, picked bit by bit from the morning's hurry, the lunch-hour boredom, the fevers of the night; Why this one is cherished by the gods, and that one not; How to win, and win again, and again, staking wit alone against a sea of time; Which man to trust and, once found, how far— Will not be found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, Nor Blackstone, nor Gray's, nor Dun & Bradstreet, nor Freud, nor Marx, Nor the sage of the evening news, nor the corner astrologist, nor in any poet, Nor what sort of laughter should greet the paid pronouncements of the great, Nor what pleasure the mulitudes have, brining lunch and the children to watch the condemned to be plunged into death, Nor why the sun should rise tomorrow, Nor how the moon still weaves upon the ground, through the leaves, so much silence and so much peace.

If time is an arrow, what is its target If a Flexible Flyer is the sled I had as a child, when may I become a child again Do you need help digging the potatoes out of your garden of insults Do you plan to vote in the next election Is our country headed in the right direction or the wrong direction and what did the bulldozer tell the yellow helmet’s ear Which part of your body is like biting into a ripe peach which part shames you like a rotten banana Would you like to find out how to lower your interest rate When you go to heaven how old will you choose to be will you have cocktails on the well-watered lawn where Bach conducts Bach Will you still chase after the Grateful Dead Is your life like air leaking out of a balloon, or like rain falling on a pond dot dot dot      dear pocks     pocking the surface     dot dot dot Can it be like snow falling on the ocean Can desire drown you like syrup over pancakes When an ambulance siren wakes you at 3 a.m. do you feel relieved not to be strapped to that stretcher speeding toward the grim unknown do you then snuggle next to someone Are you satisfied with your detergent Can you name a more perfect irony than the new world trade center, sacred icon of capitalism, revered lingam of profit, soaring above the 
memorial pools of people killed when the first towers fell Can you describe the scent of dried blood What about the smell of iron chains in your cell can you sing the threnody of the maggots When I removed my mask did I frighten you like a drone crossing your sky Are you satisfied with your auto insurance When ecstasy approaches why do you resist What are you afraid of Can you please unbutton your shirt now