“I was afraid, for awhile, that I might kill someone. Everyone
does, at a distance. But I never killed anyone, though that was only
personally.” (Alice Notley, “In the Pines,” 2007)
rejectful
rejectful
time is
continuous, rocks are not iterating
over lossy data, full of incalculable unfreedom
fed the demon
sparkly golden nectar of being lovable with a spoon
“The Lake of Great Peace was filled in
decades ago, during an
extension of the subway system”
•
filling with/satiety
incalculable unfreedom
“not four-fold enough”
“objects at dusk”
bodies distributed in endless values
in range for the hardcore complex to exercise itself
range to or near elaborate but not
enclosed
•
if you murmur-sing
in inward falsetto with
headphones wearing a t-shirt
saying I KNOW HOW TO SCORE
if you’re stopped
at the station where the handcuffed
young man, a father, was
shot in daylight and its name is symptomatic
of advertising for paradise
if very drunkenly/highly, sweetly smiling, wearing
a fishnet dress and huge dirty red
exhausted-puffy down jacket
and nothing else
you hold out your hand
i.
She said L-e-g-o-s, but I read l-o-g-o-s and thereby
in the homonymic problem
of lo/goss/ and lo/goes/ is rendered
the whole disaster
ii.
Cf. Lagos, Nigeria, and the incinerated
sequin in the brainstem, rancid
terror-adrenaline, anguish-adrenaline dripping
back down whence it surged
up lining the microlining of each bone—No: its name,
the placename of the village where the school is
is Chibok, 22 hours by car from the city. Simultaneously it came
sprayed from outside, hail of cupid arrows dipped
in the obliterative poison, burning nano-anti-
love. To gather sounds
from the object-map and sense them dyeing
a synapse-space with thought
iii.
Cf. rather mist of something approximating
22,000 tons mixed chemical wastes dumped in Love
Canal between 1942 and 1953, until
in 1970-something oozing
noxious colored liquids dye the yard. Disfound
the swimming pool, cause it to float
in its own Jell-O of corrosive—just like that.
But “outside”
synapse-space? Reading over
I’ve substituted “incinerated” for “incarnated.” The wavy line
identifying error persists through “jello,” “Jello,” and “Jell-o.”
Jell-O is the ugliest. But Legos
justifies itself?
Also unknown: microlining, placename, Chibok, obliterative, nano-, disfound.
iv.
Those girls’ lives—
v.
Space understands anti-
vi.
Black glittering ball of flying-
to-pieces wrapped
in a fine-mesh despair. A wanly flickering
space or agitatedly blank, having-gone-to-a-meeting
where shaming the publicly insufficiently rigorous or perfect
aspect of self-hatred rendered hard, forged
hard—that space. Versus quiet lackadaisical
petal of non-negotiated drifting. Glasswing membrane—
where all spaces had wept slightly
in the air. Had sat there
as glasswing see-through and also rearing up
in cacophonous mud of absolutely gendered synapse, family-and-history
rage. Bleached lavender veins and ugly melted blood
of the normative volcano of having-acted, having-been-schooled
as a girl, a vein
of synapse, lavender molten, threading
cacophonous dark. And it feels apt
to explain that perfect hardness and membrane are alike
milk-silver, marked by qualities of cake
and pencil scribble—I mean this in the historical
body-mind—the flicker-space—half-melted—qualities of half-set-up
epoxy and eating a ripe peach, of infantile rage
1) for infants;
2) for grown men with advanced degrees and drugs;
3) for women disappearing, abdicating, getting sick.
I’ve lost my train of thought. Those girls’ lives, their infants, anti-
love, and how
to notate distance, terror, what I thought she
said. Mass other
minds. At the meeting a call for “rage/destruction
liaisons” to manage public
ugly melted blood.
vii.
I know someone (not present at the meeting)
who could contrive to send the girls, in their detention, via poetic
language, old-style console video game pulsing screens of greenish names
of god, to be inscribed on their eyelids and inner wrists,
to fold them in a cakelike silver
forcefield of inviolable love. They could share it, beam
it around to bolster one another whispering
in tall reeds at dusk, in shadows of parked trucks, in laundry tent and food tent
and sex shelter, in the sick tent, walking between. Did they save their shoes, being woken
in the middle of the night? Bare feet
could be protected by my friend’s poem from thorns and shards of smashed beer bottle,
spent shell casings, spilled motor oil, vomit, trash. Terror-adrenaline reconstituted
via deft inventive language. They could resist, protect
their minds and not get pregnant, and run home
eventually on zero pathways through the Sambisa Forest with its many shimmering
levels of the god game. Of its silver wetlands, the Sambisa Forest
Wikipedia entry says: the animals died, the roofs leaked, weeds covered the roads, water stopped flowing, there was no power, and the whole reserve
became another derelict white elephant
white-silver leak, power-cover, flowing
Still, I know this person who could whisper through the language-rays
to girls to say that a pulsing lunar battery of
perfect touch glows in their chests and renders aid.
But I can’t say it. Not convincingly.