absurdity

from the series "Notes Passed to My Brother on the Occasion of His Funeral" in Mayakovsky’s Revolver

I’m always the king of something. Ruined or celebrated, newly crowned, or just beheaded. King of the shady grass and king of the dirty sheets. I sit in the middle of the room in December with the windows open, five pills and a razor. My lifelong secret. My killing power and my staying power. When the erection fails, when the car almost hits  the divider, I’m king. I wave my hand over the ants bubbling out of the sidwalk and make them all knights, I sit at the dinner table and look into the deep dark eyes of my television, my people. I tell them the kingdom will be remembered in dreams of static. I tell them what was lost will be found. So I put on my black-white  checkered Vans, the exact pair of shoes my older brother wore when he was still a citizen in the world and I go out, I go out into the street with my map of the dead and look for him, for the X he is,  so I can put the scepter back in his hands, take the red cloak from my shoulders and put it around his, lift the crown from my head and fit it just above his eyebrows, so I can get down on one knee, on both knees, and lower my face and whisper my lord, my master, my king.

The woman I love has gone to bed early so I can be alone in the living room, alone in the manic universe of August, just me arranging and rearranging the books like someone packing and repacking their parachute only I'm not jumping, only maybe the books are not what's saving me anymore. Maybe now it's reruns of The Donna Reed Show or the Marx Brothers or movies about people who are funny all the time. I keep watching the same rap video on YouTube about the stacks of money and what's going to happen. Outside it has just begun to cool down so I can take a walk if I want, see if there's a moon somewhere above the movie theater, some summer stars up there, some planet to go with the grass I'll lie on next to the school, a big field where someone is asleep  or passed out, where a dog overcomes a dead bird, just half a bird now but real in the cool dark green, motionless at the foot of the chain-link fence. If I were to go out and find that bird I would want to sit down next to it and give it a name. I would want to gather up some sticks and make a house for it to live in while it's being dead. I would want to sit there all night, and that's why I'm only going to open a window, open all my windows, so if it wants to it can come here and fall asleep in my lap. I'm sitting in the middle of the room with a blanket over my head and some letter I would like to write. Dear love. Dear motherfucker. Dear heart. Dear space, I want to write – Dear space, I can't seem to live the way i should, without loneliness, without passing out, I keep wishing I knew more about supernovas, that I had some of your dark energy, your dark matter, I wonder if you're expanding or cooling or what it will look like when you turn back toward your own beginning, what fire, what ice, what will you invent out there that Hollywood hasn't already encoded onto a disk, already built in a garage off Sunset. But space will never write back. Neither will love or real motherfuckers. So I should just stand up, grab my shoes, walk to the field and sit down in the grass. I wouldn't be alone. A small breeze making her wings life, some starlight through a pine tree making her shimmer.

"Mr Jarndyce had fallen into this company, in the tenderness of his heart and his earnest desire to do all the good in his power; but that he felt it to be too often an unsatisfactory company, where benevolence took spasmodic forms; where charity was assumed, as a regular uniform, by loud professors and speculators in cheap notoriety, vehement in profession, restless and vain in action, servile in the last degree of meanness to the great, adulatory of one another, and intolerable to those who were anxious quietly to help the weak from falling, rather than with a great deal of bluster and self-laudation to raise them up a little way when they were down; he plainly told us."

i In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction

we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other

Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking,

the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres

ii Put down the target of me you guard inside your binoculars, in turn I will surrender

this aerial photograph (your vulnerable sections marked in red) I have found so useful

See, we are alone in the dormant field, the snow that cannot be eaten or captured

ii Here there are no armies here there is no money

It is cold and getting colder

We need each others' breathing, warmth, surviving is the only war we can afford, stay

walking with me, there is almost time / if we can only make it as far as

the (possibly) last summer

Let rainbows arc and sprout from the base of my tongue and into your cupped palms, before the saltwater fishponds teem quicksilver, deep blue, and sunrise hues, before the aqueducts and irrigation ditches are sculpted into damp earth, before these mango groves are hewn, before these gravel paths ripen with fallen fruit. Before we part, breathe your song into me.

Remain by my side as wind deity, as word, as eyes bright with both dusk and amber. Remain with me so that we may keep vigil, both of us before morning's honeyed light filters through fire escapes. In our vigil, let there be only witness, and I will offer you stillness rising into unfettered dawn. Here I will weave a dreaming of lovemaking bodies' fire and salt. Here, I will teach your hands to weave crescent moon into ocean current, serpent hiss into river's rush. Here I shall weave a selvedge of we.

Ever shall there be a we, a ceaseless, insistent we, the fiercest we, bound only to the knowledge of scars upon my flesh, and the segment of my spine which aches to sprout wings. Deep within lightless dovecotes, this we shall remember the lamentation of songbirds as it remembers the lingering warmth of your retreating form. Ever shall this we know how tender, your flesh at the throat, how your fecund black loam scent sates me.

Do not let the sun steal you from my side and set you wandering, for now we know red hibiscus blooms here in your city of constant sirens. Bring me your bones and your fire, and I will keep them safe.

I remember what I have to do in order to stay alive, I take stock of our belongings most of them useless

I know I should be digging shelters, killing seabirds and making clothes from their feathers, cutting the rinds from cacti, chewing roots for water, scraping through the ice for treebark, for moss

but I rest here without power to save myself, tasting salt in my mouth, the fact that you won't save me

watching the mirage of us hands locked, smiling, as it fades into the white desert.

I touch you, straighten the sheet, you turn over in the bed, tender sun comes through the curtains

Which of us will survive which of us will survive the other

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Sudden a batteried bongo in her layback, hair root lazed sizzle, fluent spine of silver, heart a hall of solo mirror, stuttered, and why is everything swollen? Her breasts walloping, his cock a thrilling cerulean, damned adjectives all over everything. The heart relishes its role as machine, knowing no one but God can numb the forward and meanwhile, it's fuck, fuck, fuck, unbooked thrums just because. An appetite rhythmed like this must boast booms, and the mirror can't take it. Eventually, a shard escapes. Something bleeds.

Go. He say it simple, gray eyes straight on and watered, he say it in that machine throat they got. On the wall behind him, there's a moving picture of the sky dripping something worse than rain. Go, he say. Pick up y'all black asses and run. Leave your house with its splinters and pocked roof, leave the pork chops drifting in grease and onion, leave the whining dog, your one good watch, that purple church hat, the mirrors. Go. Uh-huh. Like our bodies got wheels and gas, like at the end of that running there's an open door with dry and song inside. He act like we supposed to wrap ourselves in picture frames, shadow boxes, and bathroom rugs, then walk the freeway, racing the water. Get on out. Can't he see that our bodies are just our bodies, tied to what we know? Go. So we'll go. Cause the man say it strong now, mad like God pointing the way outta Paradise. Even he got to know our favorite ritual is root, and that none of us done ever known a horizon, especially one that cools our dumb running, whispering urge and constant: This way. Over here.

Where I waved at the sky And waited your love through a February sleep, I saw birds swinging in, watched them multiply Into a tree, weaving on a branch, cradling a keep In the arms of April, sprung from the south to occupy This slow lap of land, like cogs of some balance wheel. I saw them build the air, with that motion birds feel.

Where I wave at the sky And understand love, knowing our August heat, I see birds pulling past the dim frosted thigh Of Autumn, unlatched from the nest, and wing-beat For the south, making their high dots across the sky, Like beauty spots marking a still perfect cheek. I see them bend the air, slipping away, for what birds seek.

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled, stooped to pull harder – when, sprung out of the earth on his glittering terrible carriage, he claimed his due. It is finished. No one heard her. No one! She had strayed from the herd.

(Remember: go straight to school.  This is important, stop fooling around! Don't answer to strangers. Stick with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.) This is how easily the pit  opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

it does not even want to touch, it is more like an animal (not loving) a thing trapped, you move wounded, you are hurt, you hurt, you want to get out, you want to tear yourself out, I am

the outside, I am snow and space, pathways, you gather yourself, your muscles

clutch, you move into me as though I am (wrenching your way through, this is urgent, it is your life) the last chance for freedom

1 I'm telling the wrong lies, they are not even useful.

The right lies would at least be keys, they would open the door.

The door is closed; the chairs, the tables, the steel bowl, myself

shaping bread in the kitchen, wait outside it.

2 That was a lie also, I could go in if I wanted to.

Whose house is this we both live in but neither of us owns

How can I be expected to find my way around

I could go in if I wanted to, that's not the point, I don't have time,

I should be doing something other than you.

3 What do you want from me you who walk towards me over the long floor

your arms outstretched, your heart luminous through the ribs

around your head a crown of shining blood

This is your castle, this is your metal door, these are your stairs, your

bones, you twist all possible dimensions into your own

4 Alternate version: you advance through the grey streets of this house,

the walls crumble, the dishes thaw, vines grow on the softening refrigerator

I say, leave me alone, this is my winter,

I will stay here if I choose

You will not listen to resistances, you cover me

with flags, a dark red season, you delete from me all other colours

5 Don't let me do this to you you are not those other people, you are yourself

Take off the signatures, the false bodies, this love which does not fit you

This is not a house, there are no doors, get out while it is open, while you still can

6 If we make stories for each other about what is in the room we will never have to go in.

You say: my other wives are in there, they are all beautiful and happy, they love me, why disturb them

I say: it is only a cupboard, my collection of envelopes, my painted eggs, my rings

In your pockets the thin women hang on their hooks, dismembered

Around my neck I wear the head of the beloved, pressed in the metal retina like a picked flower

7 Should we go into it together / If I go into it with you I will never come out

If I wait outside I can salvage this house or what is left of it, I can keep my candles, my dead uncles my restrictions

but you will go alone, either way is loss

Tell me what it is for

In the room we will find nothing In the room we will find each other

Because we have no history I construct one for you

making use of what there is, parts of other people's lives, paragraphs I invent, now and then an object, a watch, a picture you claim as yours

(What did go on in that red brick building with the fire escape? Which river?)

(You said you took the boat, you forget too much.)

I locate you on streets, in cities I've never seen, you walk against a background crowded with lifelike detail

which crumbles and turns grey when I look too closely.

Why should I need to explain to you, perhaps this is the right place for you

The mountains in this hard clear vacancy are blue tin edges, you appear without prelude midway between my eyes and the nearest trees, your colours bright, your outline flattened

suspended in the air with no more reason for occuring exactly here than this billboard, this highway or that cloud.

for D.D.

We made strong poems for each other exchanging formulas for each particular magic all the time pretending we were not really witches and each time we would miss some small ingredient that one last detail that could make the spell work Each one of us    too busy hearing the other voices the sound of our own guards calling the watch at midnight assuring us we were still safe and asleep so when it came time to practice what we had learned one grain was always missing one word unsaid and the pot did not boil the sweet milk would curdle or the bright wound went on bleeding and each of us went back to her own particular magic confirmed   believing she was always alone believing the other was always lying in wait.