Black Field I

~ for Dottie and Conrad

I have been thinking about you
As a kind of goo
For the mind to have visions
That are only of the mind
Or like that sliver
We enter when we write
And it is as though
Ideas had to come from some place
And there are words for those places
Or rather those places are
A kind of fundamental syntax
For the world and we need only
Pluck them from the air
We need only pluck them
From under your shallowest
Surface to say anything we want
Is it true you are the future in fact
The thinnest future we have
When we attend each other
The mind of each other as a delay
How patiently we must
Await each one each other's

Power comes...

to those who (don’t)
wait--language an in
equality what you l

end and what I actu
ally take--privilege
and what I discard I

abandon in principle
and yet know--that I
do this complicity p

okes out the old su
n’s eyes--makes some
verbs from what nou

ns controlled--pinpo
inting the voice li
ke an arrow rhetoric

silver-tongued pois
on-tipped angel--bin
ging on dominion so

ul saver and sovere
ign--must I speak to
an object appreciat

es shit--zealous cont
agion, zealous anti
thesis the undead,

unmourned, unliberat
ed, disavowed as a
kind of third sex--

seducing us back from
that bad fantasy of
ways we have chosen.

Poem for Social Practice

Distillation a matter
of feeling *against
one’s self* to make a
mark don’t connect

the dots stars didn’t
make us we made them
when we read their
pretensions of wisdom

a kind of seduction
the phatic validates
the rest is rent and
money for gas so sings

complicity always the
place the emotion
of being among so many
makes one get over

themself the things
we are not for their own
sake this room large
and ever ambivalent

I was with her deixis
a tale of survival
the survival of her
milk is memory wood

darkening that shade
no longer human with
witness you begin to
cry something will eat

the cancer that idea
must not get cut-out
you are here I don’t want
to be anything if

it takes that much
loss to be I don’t want
to have to participate
with a voice

the cracks public
makes in social space
filled by greedy
imperative spreads

cancer to what we
would otherwise
communicate be with
me make a sign to

change their signs
true leveler *an in
equality* information
like a corpse went

forth dragging its
body in the aether
where to put the
body Modernity while

we were gone value
labored *Bodies: can’t
live with them, can’t
live without them*