Juliana Spahr

Sometimes it feels like it is over and it's not. Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it's over. It's dark often at these times. Urban though, so a certain version of light too. It's hard to predict if it will start on time or how late. I'm often a little late and it has started. Last night, I could tell from the copters overhead that I was late. As I walked up, the blocks around it were emptying out. Parents pulled their children home. The night herons settled into trees. That's the outer ring. As I got closer, all that was left were the blinking lights of the motor- cycles blocking the intersections and the men and few women in uniforms that mill about the corner, helmets in their hands. They talked among themselves. Ignored me mainly. One told me how to get around. I did not clarify that I was walking towards. You can hear it sometimes. It often has a soundtrack. Sometimes it has drums and brass. Sometimes just joy. When I am late I am trying to guess its path. Last night, several times I got close to it only to be turned back by a line of cops. They let the media through but turned me back. Then it turned the corner and there it was. At that moment, I melted my body into it and it embraced me. Rosy fingered dusk and all that. Come here, it sang, listen. And then I was borne along by the waves all night and the whirlpool, the fig tree, and I was the bat, hanging on patiently. Aarav came up and hugged me. Someone grabbed me from behind and I thought it is Artem but later realized it was Berat. So much mask. I grabbed Charlotte's hand and held it for a while when things felt dicey. It felt dicey as they cornered us from two sides and we went down the tight side street, up the hill. Charlotte's hand. It's like that. Moving from isolation to the depths of friends. At first we didn't mask up. We were poets. Then slowly one by one we did. As we got turnt. As I got turnt I mean. Sometimes I still don't mask up. It often feels hubristic. I keep a bandana in my pocket. It isn't super effective. It falls down a lot. Last night, I tied it around my neck as we walked up the side street hill. I pulled it over my face as I walked past the line of cops. I noticed Emma there, throwing eggs. I ducked. Two balloons filled with paint flew by. Visors suddenly yellow. She said to me, how is your heart? And I at first worried her question. Then I realized she meant my heart and how it was turnt. It is good, I said, I am opening it; I am expanding it. And I meant it. I love you I texted Felix. Lub u!!!!!! I texted Haruto. Texting Isabella and Jackson, I love you guys. I miss you. I texted love you some forty-three times in the last few years. I texted <3 some thirty-three times. Lub u, eighteen times. Miss you, thirty-eight. She said your feed is all riots, plants, picnics, and poets. It was an accusation. She was noticing that I had got turnt. And I said, my son, my son is in my feed too. I didn't bother to argue the riot with her. Still, oh that moment. Turnt moment: I was at the poetry reading and Mia didn't go. She was supposed to read too but she didn't. She said she wanted to see what happens. Then she texts I love you and I know then that Trader Joe's has been looted. All the wines out in the street. Such sweet elixir, FOMO. Then the rest of that night. We quickly say good-byes after the reading, refuse the offer of going to drinks, careen from the reading to our home. One of us on twit- ter the entire time. Texting too. While we are driving, one of us at home runs out into the streets, towards the gas. I drive up and two of us get out of the car and I stay in the car and drive the few blocks home. My son has fallen asleep in the back. I am coughing in the car from the gas. He sleeps through it. I take him out and carry him up to bed. More texts. I love you, I text. Come by and get me when you are done. Later that night, I go out again. Miguel stays home with Minjoon. I go to a fight party; Marxist v. Nihilist. No one knows which is which. Mohamed, my fighting teacher, fights. I miss it. I love you I text. She texts back I'm high on being slugged; my eyes are swollen; I lost; I'm turnt. Standing outside, a woman gets kicked out of the club. The bouncer tosses her out and into us. She is fucked up. And this feels awful to her. Her arms wildly swinging indicate this awful feeling. It feels awful to us. Another woman tries to help her and she slugs her. She misses and the woman who she has tried to slug takes her, calms her down. I hear her saying I love you, I love you over and over. Later I will learn that she spent the entire night talking the woman down. It's like that. When turnt, sometimes one needs to be held. Still later, I stand on the street, outside my house and watch the t-mobile get looted. A man tries to stop another man who has his hammer at the ready in front of the window. The man who is attempting to stop the hammer gets hit in the face with the butt of the hammer. I decide to go to bed. It is 3 am. I text Nathan and say I love you and I'll leave the key in the box for you. The march continues on, Nathan continues on, turns left a block away and then when Nathan texts me back I know the Whole Foods is looted and they are all drinking champagne, dancing. All of them will get a cold later. Riot champagne becomes a term among us that winter. I wasn't there but I was there too. My germs were there. I too had that cold. Is this poem too heroic? I am sorry. I worry it is. Or I know it is. We are turnt to mere vandals at moments. I'll admit it. Every computer in that shop. Every phone in that one. Every car in that car lot. I don't want it to be heroic but last night I turned the corner and Nor was there with her bike and when I saw her I said I love you and we walked down the street as each window was cracked. They got turnt. Eventually we disperse. I jog for a few minutes away and out of the kettle. We joke, circle back to watch a car burn. Oliver walks by. He is hurrying towards the dispersal. I love you we say to him as he heads off. The car burns. The fire truck arrives. As I stand there watching it, it is as if everyone I ever texted I love you to walks by. I love you we call out to each other. A group of women walk by the car and stop to take photographs. So much joy they have. They are laughing with such triumph. Selfies and all. Turnt. This poem is true. I have texted I love you and its variations over and over. Sometimes I barely knew you. But the names are not true. This is not a coterie poem. Is it a milieu poem? Can it be a movement poem? I took all the names of this poem and never wrote them in. There is no electronic record of them. I found a list of the most popular baby names for various countries in 2015, the year in which I am writing this poem. I made a list, one male and one female from each list. Then I alphabetized it. And I put those names in this poem one by one. I got to O. But Olivia, Saanvi, Santiago, Seoyeon, Sofia, Yui, and Zeynep, I love you too.

The Brent geese fly in long low wavering lines on their migrations. They start in western Europe, fatten in Iceland, then fly over the Greenland ice cap to Canada. They sometimes breed on the Arctic coasts of central and western Siberia and winter in western Europe, some in England, the rest in Germany and France. What I have to offer here is nothing revolutionary. They learn the map from their parents, or through culture rather than through genetics. It is just an observation, a small observation that sometimes art can hold the oil wars and all that they mean and might yet mean within. Just as sometimes there are seven stanzas in a song. And just as sometimes there is a refrain between each stanza. And just as often this sort of song tells a certain sort of story, one about having something and then losing it. Just as sometimes the refrain of a song is just one word said four times. Just as sometimes the word is huge, sometimes coming from a machine and yet hitting in the heart; uplifting and ironic and big enough to hold all these things in its four syllables. Just as some- times, often even, it contradicts, and thus works with, the stanzas. Just as the police clear out yet another public space and yet another camera follows along behind. Just as the stream has no narration, only ambient noise. And the police move slowly, methodically in a line as if they are a many-legged machine. They know what they are doing. It is their third time clearing the park and they will clear it many more times and then they will win and a building will be built where there once was the park. In this song, as is true of many songs, it is unclear why the singer has lost something, maybe someone. In this time, the time of the oil wars, there are many reasons that singers give for being so lost. Often they are lost because of love. Sometimes they are lost because of drugs. Sometimes they have lost their country and in their heart it feels as if they have lost something big. And then sometimes they are lost just because they are in Bakersfield. Really though they are lost because in this time song holds loss. And this time is a time of loss. The police know, as they move through the park yet one more time, that they will win and a building will be built on the space. But right now, the building is not there. All that is there are the police and debris and the police deal with the debris. They push over book- shelves, open up boxes and look inside, tear into tents, awkwardly, the poles springing. They are only there to see if any humans remain. Tomorrow the bulldozers will push the debris into big piles and load it into trucks. The police wear white helmets and short sleeves under their kevlar vests. For many years the Brent geese ate eelgrass, but once the eelgrass was gone to the wasting disease and the estuaries filled, they moved inland to agricultural lands and began eating grasses and winter-sown cereals. The Brent geese are social, adaptable. They fly around together, learning from each other, even as these groups are often unstable, changing from season to season. Songs in their most popular versions tend to be epiphanic, gorgeous with swelling chord changes, full of lament too. And this song, like many, expresses the desire to be near someone who is now lost. It travels as something layered, infiltrated, unconfused with its refusals to make a simple sense. I want to give you this song sung in a bar in Oakland one night during the ongoing oil wars. The singer had clearly been lost once, but they sang as someone who eventually got in the car and drove out of Bakersfield, perhaps early in the morning, the sun just starting to rise, or perhaps later after sun-up, the light washing out everything in Bakersfield as the sun is wont to do there. Eventually they arrived to sing this song. This might have taken them many years. There was nothing that implied that the lostness was recent. But the lostness, it was clear, was huge and had been experienced fully by them. It probably doesn't matter where the sun was that day in Bakersfield when they got in the car. It probably just matters that there is a sun, still, and they got in the car and drove, drove through the oil fields with their wells pumping out amber colored oils and their refineries with tall towers that heat the oil so as to sort its various viscosities, and drove through the black cloud that is the slow constant burn of the oil wars. Then at some point they were in Oakland. The oil near Bakersfield is heavy but it often benchmarks against the Brent blend. Brent blend is a light crude oil, though not as light as West Texas Intermediate. It contains approximately 0.37% of sulphur, classifying it as sweet crude, yet not as sweet as West Texas Intermediate. When the park is cleared and the building is built, it will headquarter an oil company. When this oil company named their oil fields off the coast of Scotland, they choose the names of water birds in alphabetical order: Auk, Brent, Cormorant, Dunlin, Eider, Fulmar, and so on. Brent is also an acronym for the Jurassic Brent formation that makes up the Brent oilfield, for Broom, Rannoch, Etive, Ness, and Tarbert. About two thirds of oil is benchmarked against what is called the Brent Crude Oil Spot price. Petroleum suppliers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East often price their oil according to Brent Crude's value on the Interconti- nential Exchange if it is being sold to the West. The Brent Crude Oil Spot price is set in dollars, maintained by force, endlessly manipulated by commodity futures markets. The refrain is the moment when the singer makes it clear that they understand something about what is being lost. It was obvious they had lost their country, it being taken over by bankers and all. They had clearly been rejected. Loved too much and gotten too little of it back in return, many times. But none of this matters, it was obvious, in comparison to what is now being lost for that night even though the song is about a minor loss, about the loss of tongue on clit or cock, the singer seemed to understand s0mething about the other things that are lost. While a formation of police clear the far side of the park of the debris of its occupation, another forma- tion of police on the other side shoot the new gasses, the ones we do not yet know by name, into another part of the park where people are now clustered. This camera  has sound and every few seconds there is a pop. It is unevenly steady. The song is just about two people who are not near each other, who have probably chosen not to be near each other any more. The song reflects and refracts the oil in ways both relevant and trivial in how it tells about what happens when one lets love go, when one gives up the tongue. It might be that only through the minor we can feel enormity. It might be that there is nothing to epiphany if it does not hint at the moment of sweaty relation larger than the intimate. For what is epiphanic song if it doesn't spill out and over the many that are pulled from intimacies by oil's circulations? The truckers, the sailors and deckhands, the assembly line workers, those who maintain the pipelines, those who drive support in the caravans that escort the tankers, the fertilizers, the thousands of interlocking plastic parts, the workers who move two hundred miles and live in a dorm near a factory, alone, those on the ships who spend fifty weeks circulating with the oil unable to talk to each other because of no shared language and so are left only with two weeks in each year where they can experience the tongue in meaningful conversation. A life that is only circulations. Before the police come, before the building, in the middle of one night, a group of people form a line leading to the entrance of the park. Or several groups form several lines, all leading to the entrance. Some wear medical masks. Some wear glasses too. All pass bricks, one by one, down the line so as to make a pile. They are silent for the most part, silent enough that it is possible to hear the bricks make a clink as they fall. The pile gets bigger and bigger. It is waist high. Then chest high. Some get out of the line and climb on the pile, hold both their hands in the air because they know now is the transitory, momentary triumph and it should be felt. Others continue passing brick after brick, from one hand to another hand, arms extended, torsos at moments also going back and forth with the bricks. When they run out of bricks, the pile is topped with fencing. Then they gather behind it, waiting. Back there, some- one might possibly be singing to a child, singing the epiphanic song that alludes to losing the moment of tongue on clit or cock over and over because the child cannot be comforted, because the singer knows only loss. The room will be dark. The light will be on in the hall. There will be shadows, in other words. And the singer will know about these shadows at this moment and know they had agreed to be with shadows when they had the child. They had gambled in a sense on a question of sustaining. They had agreed to exist from now on with a shadow. A shadow of love and a shadow of the burning of the oil fields that has already happened and is yet to come and yet must come and a million other shadows that might possibly disappear in the light at that moment.

I hold out my hand. I hand over and I pass on. I hold out my hand. I hold out my hand. I hand over and I pass on. Some call this mothering, this way I begin each day by holding out my hand and then all day long pass on. Some call this caretaking, this way all day and all night long, I hold out my hand and take engine oil additive into me and then I pass on this engine oil additive to this other thing that once was me, this not really me. This soothing obligation This love. This hand over and this pass on. This part of me and this not really me. This me and engine oil additive. This me and not really me and engine oil additive. Back and forth. All day long, like a lion I lie where I will with not really me and I bestow upon not really me refractive index testing oils and wood preservatives. I lie with not really me all day long, and so I bequeath not really me a honeyed wine of flame retardants and fire preventing agents. I make a milk like nectar, a honeyed nectar of capacitor dielectrics, dyes, and electrical insulation and I pass it on every two hours to not really me. Not really me is a ram perched on a cliff above a stream, unable to be quenched by the flame retardant in furniture. Not really me comes near and takes a nectar of insulated pipes, and some industrial paints. Later I pass the breast cup to not really me, a breast cup filled with sound insulation panels and imitation wood with a little nectar and sweetness. And not really me drinks it and then complains a little, rebuking me, for my cakes of nuts and raisins are cakes of extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas, for my apples are filled with televisions and windshield wiper blades. On my breast are the curls of not really me and against the brow of not really me wafts plasticizer used in heat transfer systems. As drinking not really me takes in anger and in need not really me drinks from the hand of that sweetest sleep the juice of me that cup of adhesives, that cup of fire retardants, of pesticide extenders. And as not really me drinks I cradle the moon and not really me in my right hand my lips kissing with the dedusting agents and wax extenders. Then later in the night, the bed scattered with the stains of cutting oils and gas-transmission turbines, the blankets with blends of hydraulic fluid, we lie there together handing over and passing on filled up and attempting to think our way through economics and labor and time and biology me and not really me together. I'd like to think we had agreed upon this together, that we had a tradition, that we agreed these things explained us to us but when not really me wakes after drinking the pharmaceuticals and photo chemicals night after night and day after day not really me will sing a song of rebuke, sing the song of not really me, the song that goes like Salutations to brominated fire retardants of Koppers Ind. goes like Salutations to water/oil repellant paper coating of 3M goes like Salutations to wiper blades of Asahi goes like Salutations to bike chain lubrication of Clariant International goes like Salutations to wire and cable insulation of Daikin goes like Salutations to pharmaceutical packaging of DuPont goes like Salutations to nail polish of Dyneon goes like Salutations to engine oil additive of Agrevo E goes like Salutations to hair curling and straightening of Agsin Ptd. Ltd. goes like Salutations to insecticide and termiticide for empty green- houses of Chevron Chemical goes like Salutations to greenhouse flowers of Monsanto goes like Salutations to insecticide to kill fire ants of Rigo Co. goes like Salutations to plasticizers of US Borax Inc. Not really me's song will go on and on Not really me will sing it all night long hour after hour for weeks on end. It will have eighty-five company names in it. It will have twenty-one chemical functions in it. It will have ninety-seven products in it. It will have two hundred trade names in it. Not really me's song will rotate through these names in all their combinations. And then it will end with another part that is as long as the first and inventories the chemicals that not really me does not yet know. But oh those of you who are not really me at all I say let wisdom be your anvil and knowledge your hammer. Hand this over. Pass this on.

this is true a man in an alley grabbed my arm this is true someone called me and left the phone dangling at the post office this is true a man stalked me someone tells a story someone tells a story to another person another person says I don't believe this someone tells the story again in an attempt to convince someone tells as disbelief is easy belief is difficult, supported by constraint but a woman knows a man stalked her knows this is true a woman knows her own address her own body her lost domain, her desires, her confusions someone tells a story there are things people can do to themselves they are: leave molotov cocktail on own yard set fire to own house leave a glass of urine on own porch leave envelope of feces outside own door send a butcher knife to self at work send letter to health department that self is spreading VD stab own back someone tells this story says this is true self turns on self the knife enters at a point that the self could not have reached but did someone tells and then repeats and she stalks herself several times to convince someone tries to enter into the information to pass words back and forth that have meaning fails, resorts to this is true this is true a woman calls her stalker The Poet this is true a woman describes a stalker in terms that describe herself this is true a woman stalked herself to kill herself this is true a woman is at times a man when a fish is hooked other fish don't see the hook thrashing seems crazy the hook could be the branding of a woman at a young age by a man or an older male neighbor spending too much time with a child or the boring nature of life in the story the hook is the artist's rendering of the stalker as described by the woman it is the woman in a man's face she does not know this man thrashing seems crazy later she realizes it is herself her knife her hook her own face she was always drawing male this is true as thrashing is not crazy when one is on the hook

I This is a place without a terrain a government that always changes an unstable language. Even buildings disappear from day to day. [gendered pronoun] wanders in this place [searching [waiting the condition of unbearableness is the constant state of mind for all occupants we read all day in the village square during the rule of [name of major historical figure] a book that is so subtle [its political content goes unnoticed what is political content? [the question or the statement [gender pronoun] creates [a reader culture [generic plural pronoun] prefer both II realism's authenticities are not the question the question [role of art in the State we know art is fundamental to the [New State] as is evidenced in village scenes, majestic ancient views, masses and masses of [generic human figures] marching in columns, swords coded as plowshares, image as spectacle we kn0w [name of city], [adjective], [name of major composer] to recode [reduce] it: Linz, ambiguous, Wagner we know [name of major historical figure] calls, authentically, for a more total, more radical war than we can even dream in the language of the avant-garde we know a commercial promises to reduce plaque more effectively in this same tone but sometimes we exceed even our own expectations to surprise even ourselves something encloses the impossible in a fable an unreal world called real because it is so heavily metaphoric we can't keep our fingers of connection out of it it is a ride in the country, the car crowded with children [each child represents a different ethnicity of [name of nation] it is a moment of standing with light resonating around [major historical figure it is a guiding of the child towards the right path it is a picnic in a field, the spread is bountiful [the spread of [name of nation] is represented through the arrangement of food on the checkered tablecloth it is [name of major historical figure]'s Art Collection: figure after figure each carries spears, lunges, draws the arm back to pull tight the bow a ruined plaza has a [gendered human form] at its en trance a [generic child] draws a sword under the guidance of [generic possessive pronoun] [honorific denoting repro- ductive role] a [generic human form] raises [generic pronoun] arms and four horses turn away another plays a lute an eagle holds a symbol fake [name of nation used as an adjective] heads while the end of lunacy in art was explicit in [name of major historical figure]'s rhetoric while when nation turns to art, art loses its divergence while the [generic human figures] come back from war, their legs in fog while a [generic human figure] sculpts, small against the expanse of marble, giving into the monumental human form that symbolizes eugenic possibilities while another [generic human figure] pedantically draws postcards of village centers, operas, mountain vistas while overwhelmed by an opera [name of major historical figure] plans genocide III we know we respond resistantly as faked children's books of realist adventure tales have turned into military instruc- tion manuals or [name of major historical figure] hails a cab, [generic possessive human pronoun] hand raised here, beckoning as the red flag with [name of fast food chain] waves behind [generic human pronoun] and the red star on top of the [name of cultural landmark in major city] twinkles. many people raise their hands for different purposes all day long we are always waiting for our cab to come the question here is the same as that of a relationship where does art define our vocabulary? the margin declares [it is impossible to speak about something it is only possible to speak beside it [a film with a voice-over of nonsense to act in the unsecular forbidden margins [claims a certain privilege] [generic human pronoun] cast a colonizing eye a scripture of space / a place where a [generic human form] twists in space [follow this body] getting you to recognize yourself in [generic possessive pronoun] work [is kidnapping] in the space of this question some emigrate or lapse into total silence some co-opt this language and paint a series of meticulous and beautifully colored monumental images of people impris- oned and alone at the edge of a tedious despair some [refigure [refuse] respond] call out for an end rewritten, the goal of the artist is to prevent reality in a true and concrete manner IV [generic human figure] claims I can get more information at home than by going to the war scene what [generic pronoun] sees is [gendered naked bodies] in news photos—dead bodies, discarded bodies, junk i  saw  this written on the bottom [a way of testimony the poverty of image among the people of [name of nation] the continual increase in the amount of image a viewer can tolerate [who went to [name of nation? returning again and again to images of torture covert activities depicted              [blown up [to show power details of photographs or Xerox degradations of photos on Duraclear hang loose are vulnerable and fragmentary and images are seen through images and/or viewers [call this] the fate of Madame Bovery, the fate of Anna Karenina A dog with a [generic human face] has slogans coming out of its mouth as angels hold its head back suckle at its tits taped to a [gendered hand, adorned with ring] is a photo- graph of [gendered naked torso], gagged [generic human figure] infects computerized images with digitized viruses and then transfers them to canvas with a robotic device [possible responses to what is seen in [name of nation] at another time another set of reponses: a [sexual category withheld] cuts hair and cameras circle around and [generic human pronoun] is dragged out of the room another [generic human figure] says passionately we express ourselves in a language of regulations. Symbols and numbers best convey our ideas another [generic human figure] makes an enormous painting of a massacre victim, mutilated and bloody, and hangs it by night on a pedestrian bridge what a nation gives us is the image in [name of major weekly news source] of the [generic human figure] standing before the tanks with white flag [generic pronoun] painted on houses, streets, stones, trees [generic pronoun] covered [name of island] with strange marks in chalk, oil paint, and dye [generic pronoun] wished to reduce writing to the zero level where it is without meaning. When culture invades private life on a large scale [generic pronoun] said the individual cannot escape being raped another [generic noun] made a font that was scratched into paper by a knife this font made each letter into a single scratch [generic pronoun] scratched the other [generic pronoun]'s statement on rape into a banner and hung it outside [my zero-level writing [generic pronoun] said protest rape [generic pronoun] said my zero-level writing [generic pronoun]  said dangerous cultural rape [generic pronoun]  said my zero-level writing my zero-level writing V a voice stutters in the background of our waking mind [generic possessive pronoun] stutter is our stutter or it is the way we define our difference? stutter is nation beneath an image of human figures the words [you have nothing to lose but your chains at times two voices talk to one another [generic human] faces [tired] we know we are all constructed when it comes down to it we don't believe it the social always holds us back while the ways that we encounter relation are various we remain searching [searching we question, respond [deny we [move forward

It is dynamic positioning that Allows a semi-submersible the Ability to hover there over The well. It is a thirty-six inch tube, A casing, that extends down to allow The drill and bit to be rotated there; The drill then spudding in; the seafloor, dark, And giving way. It is a thick column Of drilling mud that keeps natural gas And oil beneath the seafloor while the well Is capped and it is a cement that Fills in the casing so the drill pipe stays Unmoving, stable, in this ever moving sea. It is a sort of drilling mud that is Then pumped through the drill pipe and out through The drill bit then up through the casing and Then back up to the oil rig in the space Between the drill pipe and the inner wall. It is a blowout preventer, a series of valves That seal off the excessive pressure should The wellhead kick then blowout. There are all These variables. Various valves. Pressures. Buoyancies. Mixes of cements. Currents. Claims. Humans. Bow spring. Top plug. Shoe track. Floatshoe. I could go on and on here calling the New muses of innovation, common Vocabulary, that covers over the Elaborate simplicity of this, This well, Macondo well, was drilled by Deepwater Horizon and it went through Five thousand feet, through the abyssal zones, The epipelagic with its sunlight The mesopelagic with its twilight The bathypelagic with its midnight Then where the sea meets floor, the deep ocean, A blowout preventer there with the fish, The darker fish, the large detritevars That feed on the drizzle of the moulted Exoskeletons, the carnivores, snipe eels Big lantern fish, and zooplankton, corals. This well then went on reaching for the oil Another thirteen thousand feet. When it hits The pay zone, down through it, down deeper, deep. This well, Macondo well, was exploratory. This story then begins with other wells, But I will tell the story of This Well: In April twenty ten, the setting south And east of Louisiana's long coast. It begins with a round of tests, some done And some avoided. An environmental Impact and blowout plan declared to be Not necessary. Drilling easy. Then On April twenty, bled off five barrels Of fluid, reduced drill pressure. No flow. At noon, a drill pipe goes in hole so as To begin mud displacement. Seawater Then pumped in to displace mud. Kill line Not bled. It goes on like this. Partial lab Results, a circulation pressure that Did not yet match the modeling results And yet cement job pumped. Fluid returns Observed. Bottom plug ruptured. Still the Cement is pumped so it bumps top wiper plug At twelve thirty. Then two pressure tests. The drill pipe run in hole to eight thousand And three hundred and sixty seven feet. So mud displacement starts, the seawater Is pumped, then the spacer, then the fresh Water. The kill line opened and pressure then Decreased. Drill pipe pressure increased. The kill line shut in. Mud offloading done. It goes on. Drill pipe pressure. Kill line open. Then drill pipe pressure high again. Then sea- Water is pumped. Kill line full. Kill line Opened, bled to mini trip tank. Flow Is stopped. Kill line monitored. It Is then open. No flow. Considered A good test. Blowout preventer open- Ed, seawater then pumped down the drill Pipe to displace the mud and spacer from The riser. It is nine o'clock. The flow Out from the well increased. Trip tank then Emptied. Then fluids discharged overboard. Pumps Restarted. Drill pipe pressure on constant Increase. It goes on like this. Pump number Two started. Pressure spike. Then pumps two, three, And four are shut down. Pump one still online. Then pumps three, four restarted. Pressure build- Ing, pump two. Pumps shut down. First pump three, four, Then one. Then drill pipe pressure fluctuates. Increases. Then decreases. Then again Increases. Then held briefly, then again Decreases. A repair begins. At some Moment hydrocarbons enter the bot- Tom of the well undetected and rise Inside the wellbore, growing quickly as They meet the lower pressure of the sur- Face, heavy drill mud, other fluids, sea- Water, all pushed by the rising and Expanding gases followed by more, By high pressure oil, gases, other flu- Ids, all there rising, swelling in The wellbore, all there, pushing from the Reservoir. It is almost at ten O'clock when mud begins its overflow- Ing of the line and then on the rig floor. It is almost at ten o'clock when mud Then shoots up through the derrick. It is almost At ten o'clock, diverter shut so that The gas and drilling fluid could be routed To the baffle plates, the poorboy degass- Er, then the lower annual prev- Enter is activated. The drill press- Ure, the volumes of gases, fluids, drill- Ing mud, seawater, then is steadily in- Creasing. And it begins again. Or be- Gins some more. First as mud. A mud that roar- Ing, rained. Then the gas as it discharge- Ing, hissing, the poorboy degasser fill- Ing. Next the first gas alarm then the oth- Ers. It was then almost close to ten o' Clock, still when next a roaring noise, a vib- Ration, engines began rapid increase- Ing as also the drill pipe pressure rap- Idly increasing as the rig then los- Ing power, shut down processes then fail- Ing. First explosion on five seconds aft- Er. Then explosion again, ten sec- Onds later. It was not yet ten O'clock when the mayday call was first made. The Deepwater Horizon gutted stem To stern. What happens next ends with eleven Dead. The rig tethered still to the deepwell. The shrapnel. The lightbulbs then popping. The Heat. Hot fireballs. The lifeboats smoke filled ovens. Some lifeboats left, not yet full. Those left Behind then jumped in to oil-covered, Still water and so swam away. Some died: Jason Anderson. Bubba Burkeen. Shane M. Roshto. Donald Clark. Wyatt Kemp. Karl Dale Kleppinger. Gordon Lewis Jones. Keith Blair Manuel. Dewey Revette. Adam Weise. Stephen Ray Curtis. I will not tell You their lives, their loves, their young children, their Relationship to oil. Our oil. The well Exploded. They then died. Some swam away. Some floated away in boats. Donald Vidrine, Curt Kuchta, Jimmy Wayne Harrell. I did Not die. I watched it then burn on a Flat screen. Anthony Brian Hayward, Steven L. Newman, David Lesar watched. And Susan Birnbaum too, watching.