Canto II
March is departing and April bouldered
into view, the days begin to outnumber
time folding, and so we sped at its internal
docking, it was inside these hours the visions
emerged, some winged beasts descending
into our spheres where we in our sleepy
nets try to tumble unabated in cycles
of
we must sleep in shifts so we each have
a turn to rest for the next moon beat
some versed in prophecy were seeping
for years the pause of nations in symbols
untold, and now all dreams are catalogues
of time’s collusion, the way we slow
and still, thrown projections on the blank
walls of generative madness, crumbling
from the underground, how thin the veil
moons orbit: feel/ my pull my/ roundness
for we were cornered by the evil of consume
men of great awareness knew how to ready
the death blows capping our ability to survive
as if not human, as if not touched by human
desires and instead caught in the nightmare wake
of capital loss and gain while the numbers
of the dying rose so high we were forced to sing
grief into the air, the keening we together
mended tunes to
our echoever and nevering
world our leaders were of a cravenmind
that salvation’s way came at the cost of reeling
into delusion, step up to the abyss of insanity
a drinking of bleach and UV lights, for cancer
was the limit of medical abundance, but now
the science provides us with no excuse not
to prove anyone worthy of invented reasons
i fear the resolve to open this country
into economic surplus has always been fueled
by greed and on the backs of can we sacrifice
many for the bank account of a few to swell
proportions unheeded
as you possess me thus far
and I possess you right back, but we had retired
the word slave for semantics of sensitivity
when what we needed was language to clearly
demarcate where we were stuck in place, time
did not grant freedom and in the dreaming, war
was thrown into images, a burning of souls
in a terrible firing, some inferno wrought upon
us in words half remembered, half recall
have we wandered in this wood sometime, lonely
and isolated in our rooms, we learned to place
our heads on lighter downs of perhaps this
won’t come to pass, let us look at the trending
of statistics across nations, how to say virtual
or of virtue, we traveled paired pandemic time
who will we tackle next to upload our disgrace
every voice in unison, in discord, has its fleeting
a cacophony of executing safe and right
we learned too much of neighbors and lovers
who would hold us down and who would leave us
but let us back to the dreams and nightmares etched
in hours we called opposite of moving time’s echo
such designs we had not collectively culled before
as if the faces in the images hold all the consequences
do you dream of war or a way out of war
and what does it mean, this unconscious sitting
with one another’s confusion, with one another
and with each, we combed over ideas of what this
new phase of vivid telling might spell for the future
of us, i fear, we are already so lost, we will never
find our ways back to imagining how to close
the ranks of terror, to believe we could escape
the poet am i, who bid we go to the edges
of love, to the edges of imagination, would we
be able to wing our way from sound to memory
which a certain blindness kept safe: enter
the second chamber which is not yet
even inside the gate, here we are still
awaiting desire, what makes us cling
to our old life, what makes us so afraid
we will abandon all hope and beg to enter
One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
the dead are one reason we keep rage
near our hearts, we seek revenge, we seek
some justice for our loss, for the cruel
ways this life asks us to surrender
all that we love and life’s sweet minutes
coalesce into our wanting and our aches
till we think some action must be the source
of undoing what man has made normal
when did a lust for violence insert
itself into our stories, how to guide
our lives back to care, in some mercy
leave behind the memory of choking
how loosely it all flutters
a memory of burning we cling
so tightly to as though suffering
made it all the sweeter, as though
the sorrow could not be loosened
from our grasps, to ventilate is to air
to press into the lung more breath
as in
to be this poetic, what erases
violence from the narrative, what replaces
a story of putting humans in cages
or how we held cures out for money
and let people die alone in their beds
is there a circle of hell for this governing
body that stole safety from our country
who printed money they pocketed while the nation
starved locked in our homes, kept from work
and yet still expected to hold ourselves together
by the bootstraps, by the legacy of American wealth
which is afforded to the 1% and we learned
bred on the backs of workers who would be sacrificed
first to the virus. we need to shop and eat
said those who would be given the finest medical
care, those who had no fear of ever going hungry
how can you feel anything but anger or despair
in the months unspooling as the madness dripped
from the lips of the president: drink bleach and prosper
he exulted, and never were we delivered from that wild
beast, we were herded into believing the economy
needed us to die. we were told we were gonna die
anyway as no relief was coming. and was it
then we sought revenge. was it then the war
inside of our collective minds deep-ended.
you will lose everything. and then you will seek
the place where you can train to take
it back. the second chamber is the answers
sought still deep in dreaming but a stirring
registers.
We have flowed out of ourselves
it is hard to believe spring turned summer
while we argued maskings, while the birds’
song increases:
Tell me the name of that tree
tell me the feature. The bark of the day echoing
into time’s fiction made clear, we wandered
days asking will there be a return, will we
ever emerge into the arms and embraces
of familiar again, will we lay down in fever
dreams
where color occurs as it fades
forever we travel towards the start
of tomorrow. let us traverse this month’s
loneliness and step pathwards to the next
chamber: thus we have adored and begged
now enter the deep and savage way
Houses, Nikki Wallschlaegar
All Night It Is Morning, Andy Young
door of thin skins, Shira Dentz
AREA, Marcelle Durand
Citizen, Claudia Rankine
Exile: Women’s Turn, Nabile Fares
“670,” Emily Dickenson
Fifteen Poems, Bobbie Louise Hawkins
All This Can Be Yours, Isobel O’Hare
The Lost Lunar Beadeker, Mina Loy
And/OR, Jenn Marie Nunes
one, Jen Hofer
