When We Breathe

"It's holy work and it's dangerous not to know that 'cause you could die like an animal down here."
--Abbey Lincoln

Longing prolongs it
That jazz at the core
The beats that did not make us one
Fret totality

Syncopate beneath the breath
What we would not
Be called into being
Or see ourselves

In the screen test dreaming
The work that is being
Done just to meet you
Undoes this with a kiss

With no greater aim do I insist
A waste burn up the sun
From whichever one
Of our distances sites

A music of those shades
What they discuss nothing like us
No resemblance to
The things we will have been.


If belief were true
What is left would be a visible
Show of emotion
A sign therefore standing in
For how the music feels
Or birds within a chorus
Something or other improvisation
Of our being not adding up.


Difference makes us super thin
Built worlds make us strong
Being would make us speak
A million greetings not ours

A feeling for the things gone out
The shores the skin without
End we may have been
A feeling fading to grief

When our figures won’t begin
To tell their work of mourning here
No future is foreclosed
Or ring of rosy squared

Profaning the future’s beauty
The past from where it leaks
Like stars leak this light
Delayed by all they’ve been.


Because one breathes
A politics to come
Withers administered worlds
Mutes them with its song

The roof is on fire
But so is your head
The roof is on fire
So why don’t we blow

No message in this
Except what we believe enough to say it
The spirit you blow
The bodies which blow it

Blow me down, go deep down
A deep down thing
Arrives in the bloodline
Breaks my heart

Like the heart was a line
Was a frame a speech to break
A kind of intervention before
The score was made

Or everything could be written down
Totally administered worlds
Poetry becomes a score
It becomes a music that heard justly
Is never just heard.