Two Poems

Amphibia

                             After Khalil Joseph’s short film Black Mary
                        featuring Alice Smith 

                 I put a spell on you;

This grooved soprano is a brackish well.
The ghosts sanctify and recollect their burlap vestments
patient as dolls, swaying, in cipher, holding court,
 
holding breath, waiting for the services to begin.
The water is always troubled here;
somebody’s some body always falling in.
 
Something fecund, carbon, wet, swole, Brown
must encourage the bodies through to the other side
Amphibia is the only pre-condition answerable to black prayer

                 I put a spell on you

There is a bayou swum in broken bones.
This kind of snatching only returns demolished things.
It is not that we are well.  Rather we have found a way to nurse

the only water source in the wail of the unpronounced.
History so strident, and always half-erect inside these walls,
swells into an Abstract.  Grabs at the throat—any throat—it can find

A shrill, anoints at the half measure, bubbles at half control.
Unction is shook, dangling and wild as the Beginnings
of any thing formed of too many worlds.

                               Whatever it is, it     —it won’t let me—
                               Ho-o-old my peace.

it has already survived the demise, the burden, 
the rape, the extort, the betrayal, the selling 
away, of all one’s beloved.

                 I put a spell on you     —Whatever it is—     it won’t let me

all the other life forms still yet spawn from here:
that pitch, that ink, that soot, that Blues,
that din, that dusk, that musk, that brood

is-is that which had no way to be enough. 
And it is that-that which could not have ever been 
Enough. It is-is is-that that-that which would require 
 
all abandonment of need.
to scout out that which might could 
hold the prophet inside the promise 
 
        of more-more more-more more than enough.

that fund, that firmament, that fire. That-that which
—Whatever it is—must needs be all that there ever was. 
All that there ever must will ever be. The Trouble? 
 
—here in this absence of all else—

trembling, roiling through this pond. 
Our trouble suffers the drowning of planets 
swallowed undead inside the terror of the whole world. 
 
Breonna Taylor died again today in our arms 
[why how will she die again in our arms tomorrow?]
                              she’s mine She’s, mine. 
                she was mine-mine.     She was mine

                             i put a spell on you; 

a cry, for one mortal man, cannot sound like this. 
this sound—the stretch of it—the grief straining into the
Fissure at the Universe’s edge. this half-soprano half-beast. 

half-killing field half-birthing ground 
must be the only siren Left broadcast 
on behalf of all mankind. 

 

Cyborg Heaven
          After Alberto Pereira Jr. 
                    
 
How might a poem ever be entered
If one insists on living outside of it
 
as if truth ever estranges from its confession. 
shut off, attenuated—Severed even—from the silence 
 
hoping for a quiet burial of its secrets 
inside the belly of a thing
 
—is a body
 
                   Touch. 
                   touch It
  
the crushed, frot grape, 
the burst skin of an opened chalice
 
the ferment lust routed towards its own becoming 
a swallowed, a delectable, an abusable thing. 
 
plain as evidence: how hickeys cum first, leave second-hand.
mapping, in an instant, the truancy of the desired 
 
and its bruised consequence.  the Possessed remind of 
their dispossession. the lover, the scorned incite 
 
the tangled algorithms to their dangled,  
non-local dance of the Survived.
 
                   Touch 
                   touch me here
 
COVID-19      80s come HIV 
2020 unspell the undercount of 
the infected and the unbelieved.  a mirror referees 
the chupacabra apart from its chimeric twin 
 
still haunting the olde AIDS mausoleum 
toggling between        pixel +time, 
 
betwixt  Java + script New Worlds 
project into and out of the digital forest 
 
where screens screen now as much for the troll
as the Corona; the drone, the android, the teletubby 
 
as much as the quarantined. 
 
                   Here in Cyborg Heaven where we are all only fans 
 
of the fatte, the femme, the nanosex 
the trans, the zaddy, the bear, the cougar, 
 
the intersex and the polyamorous. the non-binary codes 
of the sapio-sanct,       pan the bi sexual algorithms of the marooned 
 
                   Here where apples and operating systems bear less and less fruit
 
more and more seed spill into isolate
and heartache. pills pop, crystals smoke
 
the anxious and the paranoid into novel forms 
of forgiveness and the unforgiven 
 
                   Every one hides behind an instagram scene
  
pandemics push portals onto the outcast fringe 
of the human condition. Shame and stigma snag 
 
right where the shunned escape, battered and bruised 
into their ennui Underground
 
                   Every box signals a beginning
 
of a turn, a twist, an impulse
a tremor, an anguish, a horned head
 
a taut arm, a whetted hand, whistle 
the opened organ called to task 
 
the hardening fruit of the willing and the wild. 
The Object is to get inside, beside, beneath it            get into it 
 
test how the right entrance can make as much 
noise as the Entered. 
 
Touch, touch, touch, touch-touch it!
every crevice, every ending, objects to nothing 
 
Zoom-in magnify how salt, pearl, water exudes for you 
behind the glass, in front the screen, in opened air. 
 
Don’t it move you into your want?: 
emulsify, trigger, reflex, unfold before intent 
 
                   Attends to any theory of mind
 
Touch touch touch me please
I am it      and it       is not me
 
blood belongs and un-belongs 
to the viral, the virile, the vile 
 
the live stream clings and un-clings to the breathy contour 
of its own ecstatic perdition
 
tunnels, tides, tubes swell their miasmas into 
the surrounded air.  Our insides bare the implicit need 
 
to be touched, to be held, to be nursed,  by the enveloped 
suck of hot tongue and recycled wind.
 
                   Touch me        touch me          Touch me        please
 
The boxed, the unboxed
The bruised, the belonged
 
The looked over, the overlooked
the puddle, the oasis, the pond.
 
The breeding ground for the succumbed
and the spawned, the required, the acquired 
 
the healed, the traumatized, the fixed, the fixated, the errand 
boy, the homing pigeon, the prodigal, and the returned
 
                   We are what else besides a meeting ground:
 
Heart   body    fluid    mind
Touch me PLeasseee
 
Where mask nor rubber can 
withstand the cover of this
 
blood borne anointing.  Laced to my sins, my heart
my obsessions,  my endeavors, my crimes, my longings 
 
                   Received, endowed and pressed into Beings 
 
like me. Touch us please!
The infected, affected, the unadorned
 
and the adored.  Here every transgression belies
the confectioned underbelly to every sacral push
 
and Insists we hold out and on to some thing 
any thing holy, warmed, and Divine (d).