it’s hard to tell the singer from the song
||: The sun on the water seemed
to be moving in a spiral
w/ just a peek of the crick
shunnelling through
you got this life to live
what do you wanna do?
‘Take dictation from god’
the poet said
pretty much laze about and
eat chips
It must be my disposition
out of green stuff woven. :||
novel reef
morning and there’s
contrails in the sky
I am an organism, I thought.
or my guts were
I am a tiny worm waving a pen in my hand
I’m an emoj of the sun followed by
an emoji of four-pointed stars.
I sighed in my cup.
I had no more belonging than any of you,
and between the honey jar of my comportment
and the honeybear of my sweet sentiment
something was lost. to avoid a scenario
where the man is always wanting and
the woman is always withholding
there just simply was no more man,
no more woman. the bottom of the
floor only nearly fell out from under me.
there was a sort of scaffolding
to cling to and to build a life aroud
the way limpets and scallops clung to the girders
of an oil rig, a novel reef, a pole that runs the length
of the water column.
I am an E, singing into the space of an A
the tools of poetry
You might as well make friends with your tools.
-Joy Harjo, from a talk at the Barnes Foundation 25 march 22
walking by the river, thinking of that tool
I couldn’t cry the cherry blossoms were opening and on
the verge of opening
the trash in the waterfall I still couldn’t cry
and the tampon that had bloomed in the wet water
still couldn’t still couldn’t
‘never leave the premises’ said rumi
on being in the poem on being in the room
of the poem I know the pun was cheap
they found a new star today
in a region of warped space and they gave it
an english name earendel
down by the river, though I’d given it a wide berth,
a goose hissed at me
I saw its pink tongue
swallows dipping along the schuykill & a redwing
blackbird streamed thru the cherry trees
there was trash and shit everywhere and the glory
and the beauty and the smashed yuengling bottles
and the exhaust I breathed + cd I have
the discernment to realize which were my tools
and which my hindrances. poetry in the glass
poetry in the water which was an imperfect mirror
the way that milk
is in the butter
the english queen and the indian boy
from what I can understand, a star crossed
w/ a mycellial structure, crossed w/ a bee
speaks to me in the form of a cloud
dripping rain, and in its patter I discern
the words, in the pattern of the drops
but I have already seen this hand I hold
before me, I mean this hand making
the cerulean vermillion I mean making the blue
one red. and oh, I was read to the core,
in the world of the mushrooms one could see me
w/out varnish, titania with one syllable removed
the english queen or the indian boy, which
was it was not the question. I was clocked,
no hormones could save me, no knife
could unearth me, I sang w/ the worms
no new song, no new song under the sun
the greatest messiness, humbled in the hard
rain, soaked through to the shoe, wetted to the toes, christ,
the hard rain down can rain
it was all too obvious to be believed
it had all already been written
blue clouds, blue tears rolling down my face
it was all how it had already been drawn
or painted in the schools of art, I rolled
the dustings of the eraser into a smutty pink ball
and ate it, what could those gone letters tell me
and dropped the wore out battery into my tea
what power, what dííyi, clock of ages toll for the spider,
toll for thee, looking at its hand in a wilderment
of arrows, shot at random toward the april sun
whats the matter sun, afraid of the luminous darkness?
behold my breast and my scars, barechested
impervious to your light and what to your exit then
tugging at the curtain’s rope and w/ all that
ink on your fingers, stultified,
finally apprehended, obvious as a cowbell