5 Poems Made of Clay

 I.

By now you would think

That I would be well-practiced

In molding my body into

The shape of grief. 

Yet I still struggle

To prepare a vessel

That can hold a 

Missing person.

No one taught me

How to contain

My own past lives

Let alone yours.

Yet when I think of you

I am sunk between

Time’s crumbling teeth 

Its rotting mouth.

Marching backwards 

Through the decay

I try to identify the moment

When you decided to end it all.

II.

Is that what drew you to me? 

The smell of my molding body 

Wafting over masticated flesh?

Was I adorable carrion for you?

Or did you see something living

Between the cradle of my hips?

Signs of life furtive and ferocious

I have always been living and dead.

Is that what drew me to you?

When you arrived to me it felt

Like the end of a long pilgrimage

When faith gazes at the Gate of Wonder.

You approached my gate unfazed

At the young-blood rust that gathered

Around my hinges like snow in sepia 

Weary from life’s openings and closings.

But you never unlatched my door

Instead you took out your camera

Pressed record, and waited to see

What cinema rises from rust.

III.

On the final day you press stop

And show me the movie you made

Scenes move on and time lapses

You point out the signs of life you found within me.

IV.

Two men walk into a dive bar 

And no one turns to look at us 

Have you ever felt the relief that comes

From being unnoticed?

We sit at a table and practice time magic

Your age mellows my youth 

My youth emboldens your age 

We make a list of the things time gave us:

Bar nights (“time gave us this”) 

Movies (“time gave us this too”) 

Music (“this is what we give back to time”) 

Each other (“yes”) 

We finish our beers 

We go to the bathroom

You look me in the eyes 

“Jay, we have so much time.”

V.

Clay, the opposite of assault

Is me lying in your arms 

Clay, the opposite of self-harm

Is drinking whiskey and coffee beans with you.

Clay, the opposite of fear 

Is the smoke signals from your cigarette

Clay the opposite of danger

Was meeting you and knowing your face.

Clay, the opposite of what time gives

Is what time takes away

But that is not a lesson for the living 

It can only be taught from the mouth of a corpse. 

When I mold my body into the shape of grief

I try hard to envision the pottery of a mouth

I thought the opposite of grief was you being alive

But now I know that’s not true.

The opposite of grief is remembering that you were always here. 

Holiday Haikus 1-6

 I.

Yuletide joy flutters

through winter's suspended light 

warm spirits shimmer

II.

Masks cover faces 

But can't contain our vast smiles 

Fear gives way to hope 

III.

Southern snow is rare

An omen of coming change

Revelation melts 

IV.

The family vigil

Sends satellites into space

Tender, loving eyes 

V.

Sheltering in place

Imbues the body safely 

We await the Spring

VI.

This has been so hard

I extend a hand to you

In this--together

Reverse Bastard

Do not go down to sorrow
Or fall too deep into despair 
Even as all around you
The lake of fire
Flares up in solar crowns

Tongues of flame
Licking their lips
A brutal theatre
Reproduced. 

And you have walked 
Through that fire 
Multiple times 
The smoke curling from
Your burning effigy 
Dispels old magics
Drives stale spirits
Out of the room.

Fire blooms in your spine
You bend your back 
You get a good look
At all the blood spilled 
On the kitchen floor
At all the generations 
Spun and churned
To fuel this lingering curse.

This curse that 
That breaks the bond 
Between father and son 
Turns blood pressure
Into a fever dream
And a lashing out
Of paralyzed hands.

This curse that
Creates bastards 
Sustains them, even
In floes of 
Frozen histories.

 
A curse of space and time
That can only be reversed
By transmuting the 
Traumas of the heart
And the body's alarms
Into beacons of a new
And brighter future.

You scrub the blood off the kitchen floor
Hear the pot of water 
Writhe and simmer on the stove
An augur of purification
Scrying for proof
Of that second life.

Heart Negotiation I - Ambient Music

 As much as I hate to say it

As much as I hate to admit

I'm hanging out on Soundcloud right now 

Watching those aural waves rise and fall 

Crest and break upon their peaking 

Filling orange bars

While they're spitting lyrical bars

Redefining the line between genre and form 

I morph between aesthetics 

Audios flits between bangers and bassline

To tranquil dreamscapes

It is here, adrift on lightening clouds 

In these recurring midnights of the soul

I set myself free in shimmering landscapes

And let loose my longing

Among those glittering sounds 

Bud Light

Alternative Title: Reverse Bastard Examines the Genetic Nature of Alcohol Use

You were not there when I needed you the most
There is so much more to say or to ask.

In asking, I approach you:
What is the bond between father and son?

The bond between father and son
The space between the chip and the shoulder it is placed on.

The chip, placed on the shoulder
The world placed on Atlas' back.

Bent back I shouldered your absence
A fire blooming in my spine.

In my spine, that fire bloomed
I hobble on blackened feet.

On blackened feet. I walk through this world darkly
Dad, do you walk through this world darkly?

Dodging slivers of glass
Hidden among grass blades.

Hidden among the grasses' blades
Always drawn -- safety the gasps between shuddered breaths.

Drawing breath I shudder as air fills my gut with rot

The fermented smell of blades of grass-sheathed-glass.

That fermented smell, that first Bud Light
I saw you drink and saw you smile for the first time.

How could you not?

You drink and smile for the first time in days. 

Budding light, that brilliant friend
Lifts the chip off of your shoulder.

And I follow behind you, your chip and your  promise
Blades of grass glinting off of brilliant friends.

Who know you more than I ever could
Dad, the first time I drank it was because I wanted to get to know you.

Blackness (Consent not to be a Single Being)

Alternative Title: Reverse Bastard Reads Too Much Theory With Their Morning Coffee

after Fred Moten,

To participate in Blackness is not a negation of the Other
But an embracing of the consent to not be a single being
To exist in the gap of what I am believed to be vs what I am
All those emergent variables reconfiguring themselves along multidimensional planes
To become the nexus and the model

The cause and its effect containing multitudes
Which in themselves become multitudes
Which in themselves are bounded and reshaped by the
Shifting trajectory of revised timelines

Blackness, the embodied guardianship of repressed histories
Blackness, crystallized and historical memory

My dark pulse counting the metronome between
life and afterlife
ancestor and descendant
colony, post-colony, post-racial, re-racialized, bound and repurposed
Entombed and incarcerated preemptively within the body
That harbors that freedom dream which anchors
And dissuades from colonial rage

Embodied and immanent, time forced into the present
By the eruption of my ruptured patience and measured hope
Watchtower, I am watchtower
My ticking hands pulling the thread of eternal recurrence
That reminds the soul of the shift between essence and instance

Being dismembered and whole across transverse planes
Phatasmic limbs gesticulate spatial reason
Reveling in the erotics of fragmentation
Raging in the celibacy of putting myself back together

Being within and without
I stand beside myself
Blackstar singularity
Instantiated, analyte, pitch-black blur
Essentialized, phalanx, golden horde

Black Boy Wears a Mask During a Pandemic

Standing still, social and distant

Any soft touch is filled with suspicion

But this is what I know

Affection tinged with bitter hate

You would freeze if you saw me

Disrobed, a wisp in your forgotten history

Tragic – the practiced ice of my breath

Considered viral at all times

The shifting of my skin from suburb to suburb

Black contorts to green lawn and red wine

I was Black before you were sick and

I could be the first to go

Pandemic – the lift of my rising lungs

Cloth wrapped around my face

Darker than black

Pull it off and I can lighten up at any moment

Every day is a mask

Every day has been a mask

In which I have been seen and keenly avoided

When you cross the street

Grip your purse

Hold your dog back from the onslaught

Catastrophic – my full and rising blood

loverboi

1.

Lover, I do not know your name
Because I did not ask for it
A name is wrapped up
In the heart's asking
And we reserve our hearts
For the world outside of the
Brief joining of our bodies

Because what the heart asks for
Emerges not-in-between
The back and forth of our
Enduring Longing and

[the name does not enter here]

Fleeting Satisfaction

[the name may enter here]

2.

Lover, or more accurately:
Lover who is my approximation of Love's body

I hope that you are living
Outside of my body and
Living outside of your body because
The body refuses the asking of the heart

[the name as it enters]

Until it observes the asking among other bodies
Who ask the questions we dare not, and when
the asking is observed it causes something within your body and my body

[not quite Enduring Longing]

To unfurl darkly and shamefully
So as to avoid the body's hands and eyes
To hide among the interstices of the heart
Briefly detected as a dull ache
Present within each heartbeat

I know you know what I'm talking about because
We both remember the moment that that dark unfurling
Was given to us (because it was given to us)
By someone else (either your mother or father or some older boy
In your childhood and for that I am so, so sorry)

That silent wound that bends your knee in proposal
To ghosts of men who haunt your sex
We have both chased these phantom loves
Blinded by our velvet rage
Now do you see
How your past
Coils around my past and
Our futures begin
In that same frayed thread?

It ends in the same place too
A deathbed hallowed by 13 angels around
Your head and my head
When they whisper back the secrets of
Your longing and my longing--
Is that when your name will reveal itself
Written in the Book of Life
That only holy eyes may see?

3.

Lover, when will we stop playing these games?
It is our queer hope to exceed
The violence of this world
That violence that breaks
Your hold on my hand and
Sends you out the door.

How fucked is it that the game we play is one of survival?

Our bespoke love tailored in shadow.
Our love's light transfigured to refract
Our hidden shame.

4.

Lover -- if I could
I would ask your name and
Use its power to set us both free but
Instead we accept our sex and deny
Our yearning
Trembling, I coil myself around you
To invoke the not-in-between of
Your not-name through
Incantations of bastard's magic

One day we will know each other and
Someday, somehow, someone in a future time
Will know our names and
Speak of us fondly.

Microdream: Dawn Chorus

I traded my old water bottle in
Went from a bright cerulean blue -- deep with feeling

To a stern metallic grey -- sleek, cold, and withholding
All the things I wish I could be

When that vortex of feeling
Takes hold of me

Surrounded by the racket
Of the dawn chorus
All the birds singing their agonies
Through the bright blue day
Their notes suspended in the cold winter light

In that cold winter light suspended
I asked myself for forgiveness

I gave up on writing poems a long time ago...
The world doesn't care about the art
Of the personal tragedy anymore
The planet is dying
And no one gives a shit

We are too isolated
Within our own hierarchies of pain
Most of my friends (me included)
Are worried about finding jobs

(And if not worried about finding jobs,
 then worried about finding love,
and if not worried about finding love,
 then worried about finding themselves)

Incantatory, Your Steps

Incantatory were your steps
Cycled in rhythms of
Lamentation + celebration
Your comings + goings
Form the circumference of that circle
Giving shape to the reminder
Of a future reunion

There is no easy way to say goodbye
So sitting in silence I care for you
While you admire the sight of me
Dressed in yellow for the first time
A dim sun in my room's low, purple light.

Your body + my body
Is that of man and man
And that human craving that anchors us
To the floating frenzy of this world
And how long have a I thrashed!
Desperate to release the tether

Tattered + exhausted
I succumb to the day-to-day
Remembering fondly the night-to-night
Intimacies that saved us
From our selves
When the moonlight whispers
Loud as ice cracking under the weight of liquor

Drunk -- we fall into this!
I stumble into your second world
And you are elemental + longing
And I am elemental + longing

Skeptical I wonder: Is the bed a grave or a cradle?
Together we are figuring it out
Figuring it all out

Amber

A family moves towards reconciliation
Scrubs the blood off the kitchen floor

Evidence of the ways they were made
To raise their children

A brutal theater reproduced
Silence and sound become twin barrels of the same gun

All things in their right place
My childhood home is a war museum

See how all my subterfuge
Is laid bare at my feet

The boy, hidden -- a spy in his own home
These signs I learned to interpret to protect him

My grandmother's church hat-- a threat
My grandfather's blood pressure -- a premonition

My sister's bratty ways -- a nuisance
My mother's entire life -- a warning

My father's absence -- a void
My own body -- a reaction

I've been queer in a way that's failed me
I've been terrified of my own family

A family moves towards reconciliation
Scrubs the blood off the kitchen floor

Evidence of the ways they were made
To raise their children

A brutal theatre reproduced
Silence and sound become twin barrels of the same gun

All things in their right place
My childhood home is a war museum

See how all my subterfuge
Is laid bare at my feet

And yet every card they bought me kept
Every birthday and graduation remembered

Celebrated in memory's amber
That fragrant resin resonating through time

These small, pleasant reminders
Pulling me back from margin back to center

Beach Haikus #1-9

Wrapped up in sea breeze
Pelicans triangulate
The sky dreams in blue

Waves crest, break on land
The sea and sand mingle here
Elementals talk

The ocean contains
Each and every one of us
Past, present, future

Throwing yourself in
At the mercy of the waves
The thrill of return!

We live in the wake
Submit to the undertow
Hear slaves whispering?

Beach-time isolates
Whirlpools thrash -- salt in vortex
Lungs remember breath

Love transcends decades
It lingers bright as sunburn
Blushing, enduring

Laid out on the beach
Music drifts through sunlit air
Sun kisses body

Fly in buttermilk
You clash with your surroundings
Who started this fight?

Microdream: Grief

Each and every thing

I can pluck from my mouth

From day-to-day

Feathers

Ashes

Songs

Anything that drifts

Lazily in the air

And flutters onto the ground

To alight in the crucible

Transformed by its longing

Marked by the sounds of love

That has nowhere to go

Dry January/Ex-Dream

The first, second, and third days tremble through the week

Stumbling and nascent, their legs shaking off the weight of entering the world

Anew

Senses sharpen like knives on the whetstone

Appetite and thirst shift between stagnation and craving

How odd to think of you now…

On the fourth and fifth day my stomach

Sends me quaking into the kitchen with appetite and thirst

Renewed

I toss together kale, spinach, arugula, and olives dressed with tahini and garlic

When I first met you

You were dressed in bourbon and ginger

The night flushed in your cheeks and eclipsed your demeanor

Earth’s shadow pours blood over the moon

The sixth and seventh days convince me

Of my power over the urge

I button up my shirt, slip into oversized slacks

Crank up the car and it sputters with the weight of age and rust and moisture

Before ambling through the driveway, scraping past the shoulders of bushes

Their waxy leaves winking in the winter morning light

When I first met you

I noticed your eyes were the color of hazel

They danced between green and cold

The same way the sunlight does, bouncing from leaf to leaf

On tree to tree

How odd to think of you now

As all my poisons are dispelled from my body

Microdream: Dad

You were not there when I needed you the most.
What else is there to say?

Golem, Upon Realizing the Holy Word on HIs Forehead Was Love

Golem, Upon Realizing the Holy Word on your  ForeHead was Love

Did you quicken and feel beating in your chest?
When the holy word on your forehead pulsed
did you know it as the voice of god?
Is the voice of  god an algorithm
wrapping strings of code around your head
A crown of predictive values wrapped around your head?

Do you know where you will go before I tell you?
Did your will tell you where to go before I told you?

Around your head a crop of moss flushes green and bright
Atop your clay and flesh
From clay to flesh and back again
Sacred and profane
God's breath pulsing through your body
Does the holy word on your forehead whisper commands or comfort?
Does it keep you in the cold attic or bring you the living room's warmth?


Automoton with breath of light
Are you a body or a construct?
Do those ball joints bear the burden of living
Or the weight of command?
Is this missing piece a rib ripped from your body as you took
your first steps in the garden or is it a design flaw in the blueprint?

Is your blueprint a schematic or is it a map of genetic code?
Think about your answer carefully?
One means you were created.
The other means you were born.

Here's a hint: If you were never created, you can never be destroyed...

Habitualism, Or When the Process of Cultural Memory Is Lubricated by Alcohol

Habitualism

Gateway gate·way noun -- a means of achieving a state or condition

They say that in the beginning
The world was formed
When the god's light expanded and burst
Dripping like honey to meet our eager mouths
Filling all of us bright and supple
Living and angry vessels
Primordial and sublime
Forming our shapes from light and shadow
We lanced through the darkness as we fell to earth
We landed and began to consume
Our fathers drank and never stopped...

Habit hab·it noun -- a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.

My father drank and never stopped
When he tried to speak only foam came out
Once I saw Aphrodite try to be born from the froth of his mouth
To divine the truth from the spittle he made
From the bubbles she coaxed I saw glimpses of his memory
Many of the bubbles were blacked out and empty
But a few shone iridescent with the clarity of the past

In the first bubble
my father's father whose face I have never seen
walking away with his back turned
his head bobbed up and down with each step
left, right
left, right
going, going
going, gone

In the second bubble
my mother laying heavily upon a hospital bed
heaving under the weight of birth
her sweat twinkling around her head like a diadem
she looked almost like a constellation
as she bridged the gap between two worlds
she holds her own hands while my father reaches
for the bottle in his heart

Tradition tra·di·tion the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, or the fact of being passed on in this way.

The only thing I inherited from my father
Was the bottle in his heart
With it I can perform my most miraculous acts
See my anxieties?
I turn them to wine
Depression: wine
Loneliness: wine
Inadequacy: wine

To perform the miracle
You must practice the ritual
It begins every time my moth-eaten knees
Prostrate themselves on the tile of the bathroom floor
They've rounded out an archive of every offering I've made
And every prayer I've presented to my cracked toilet seat

What god will spring forth from the foam of my mouth?
Will it be another love-god aiming to seduce the truth from my ravings?
Or will it be a toolmaker-god, who can forge an instrument strong enough
To break a son free from his father?

Major Arcana: The Illustrator

When the Illustrator enters
It signals the need to observe one's own will
As their pen strokes paper
So does intention stroke reality

When the Illustrator enters
Thought is given outline
And outline is given shape
And shape is given substance
And substance is given form

When the Illustrator enters
Light bends about us all
The vibrant colors of our empathy
Wraps prismatic around those we hold dear

When the Illustrator enters
They grasp imagination in their hands
Dream is a medium they've mastered
Hope sits on the tip of their tongue
Intention becomes a gentle stroke upon our history

A Litany of Transcripted Voicemails Demonstrating Need

Hello.
Maybe I'm just green.
Ain't you this? Can you call me?
Maybe try him again later.

Hi, my name is [redacted]. Can I get appointment by tomorrow Friday like around 2?
My phone number is [redacted]. Thank you.
Hello. Hello you babe. This is [redacted]. He needs
you need the paper for me to prove that he is he does have
Medicaid. Because you want to go to his appointment.
Thank you.

Good morning a message.
Hey jumbled, but Joseph when you meet me by window.
Poo poo poo poo. Poo poo Jessica, Cecila, Daddy.
Okay. He's about to Jessica call. You got to do call
me back right away or Dana South with the deletion
of Emma I sent.

Hello, this is a spot. So I wanted to talk to you
if I bring his wife tomorrow morning with more than 1
in with him to the agency on Roku called her wife has walk.
Just please answer him or leave a message for him.
Thank you.

I am accept last addition. LOL mo at Dr. Raja.
My other question is on the faucet the tuna noodle
on Stan Bennet. I'm leaving the kids a bath, but I know
he is mentally and Penta. Restylane Ella there is room.
Yeah after work. The homemowner.

Hi, please. Call me back. I have been submitted my friend
talk to that. Please call me back.

Good morning, son. I can come by the agency please
call me back. I need to review record. I was hope.
My doctor yesterday you say he won't lose a result.
To the hospital no cost he wants right now. You want to do
because he want to do. Some more 444 this on a result Okay.
He need is a my son to my son did to my my blood oh
my God.

Okay. Joseph Hey Lee. Matoaca break for your
name in the Bible she doing a pack of simonini mom
as promised. I did lose. I'm unable to be found.
This is a concern. I know the calendar this way.
This made me happy mark. I know you're going to send
over the next year settlement message is equal glenda
more definition of your dependent will be interested
lifetime the commandment you mad at me. I say Shanna
green card sash on for the barbed energy you massage
may notify the agency, but you might obama tee-hee
open position as a green card one of the duck. I'm in the
material on Shadow reaction social security disability and
mom would check up to the minute. I'm about to go shopping.
I love you. Do you never give up?

Black Boy Converts Himself to Nitrogen to Survive

Upon when eyes enter and penetrate
My body -- yield myself to gaseous form
Set and release the bones unto electronic fields
And hereupon now find myself rotating in valent orbitals

The laws of nature transcend the laws of man
If only because they are unspoken
Or unobserved
Or unobservable as they shift as soon as they are seen

I render myself to a new and gaseous form
I consider the shift of my atomic weight
Nitrogenous in my prestige
And just like nitrogen I am cold and absent of life

I mean to say that if I am not alive then you cannot hurt me
Can I say it again?

If I am not alive then you cannot hurt me.

Inorganic and alien.
Can you see the room filling with me as I expand?
Look how I feel every space.
Transformation is one way to exercise agency.
What I mean to say is that I am not a victim.

If I am not alive then you cannot hurt me.

Can you see the room filling with me as a I expand?
Look how I fill every space.
I displace all the oxygen in the room.
And now anyone who dares to gaze at me asphyxiates under my atomic weight.

I am not a noble gas (and I would never pretend to be).
What I mean to say is that I am not a victim.

I am gaseous as mist evaporating in the new day.
Gaseous as the moon pulling itself out of the water during sunrise.
Unspoken and unobservable
I shift as soon as I am seen.
Look I am governed by the laws of nature
Invulnerable to the gaze
I shift as soon as I am seen.