(for Hanif Abdurraqib)
What’s good, big homie?
Me, I’m just trying to find a way to stay with it.
Just trying to crack the shell
that separates us.
Just trying to be a fabric sample
of the softness that will save us.
We can do so much better than holding on, big homie.
There’s more space than that. Stop scrunching yourself.
Stop shrinking yourself. Stop eggshell-stepping
in your own damn house.
Lemme rephrase the question:
which desires do you have shame over?
It’s cool to care, big homie. To let it be
important to you, to let it be risky.
God has fucked around
and made you too powerful.
Keep showing up, keep noticing
the constant becoming.
Open wide and let it filter through you
prismatic and warm.
Nobody’s stopping you but
you, big homie.
Get in there
like swimwear.
Just say it.
Say it how it feels, how it hums
like a tuning fork.
That’s plenty, big homie.
That’s all you can do.
There is no opting out, big homie.
You cannot omit a single part of it
without changing all of it.
Fuckin butterfly effect, big homie.
All mistakes are the fulfillment of a secret wish.
All mistakes bring you one step closer
to what you need.
All of this was inevitable.
Friction is the only way to make fire, big homie.
Slow down, big homie.
Come back.
Walk with me.
Life is so incredibly long
how many times
we can be met
and known
and parted
and forgotten.
That sunshine you asked for is on the way, big homie.
Lemme rephrase the question:
what do you yearn for?
The yearning,
big homie,
the yearning is the point.
Tag: words
is it safe for dogs to eat
asparagus?
silvery snakes bashed into the sidewalk?
shame?
hot Cheetoes?
old solutions to new problems?
libertarianism?
Eastern Standard Time?
anti-natalist literature?
Nutella pancakes?
gratitude at the ability to feel anything at all?
emails from Cyclebar that arrive well after death?
legacy admissions to Ivy League universities?
three falcons, hunting?
egg salad?
an unhinged desire to be the sun?
consequential violation of unjust laws?
Herman Hesse’s secret from the river?
elegiac poetry?
raisins?
serendipitous loss?
AI-generated art criticism?
intolerable pain?
nag champa incense cones?
the baseless dichotomies of
sun and leaf,
man and beast,
self and other,
savior and saved?
devil’s cartwheel
Uncertainty, come and sit in my lap.
Close the circuit of pleasure
between us, let me
rub the small of your back, let me
stroke the shocking fuzz of your electric fur*,
let me fry you a pork chop, let me
watch your face change shape, watch me
tear you open like a Christmas gift.
Uncertainty, I have some questions for you:
Who was it that licked the sweat off my skin?
What is it that pain demands of us?
When I thought it was pudding but my mouth surprised me with ketchup and I gagged.
Where the hell did all of my dread go?
Why am I writing when I could be lying face-up in this here creek?
How is there always just enough?
What’s mine?
What’s yours?
What can we share?
Everything?
Is that not self-obliteration?
Is it not heaven?
Uncertainty, come and sit in my lap. Or better yet,
let me sit in yours. Or better yet,
put a dog collar on me,
feed me peanut M&M’s by hand, come with me
to co-sign a lease
on a brand new car.
Peel me like a grapefruit.
We are common-law married and
you’re never leaving
so I might as well make room
for you in my chest,
zip you up in my favorite hoodie,
buy you a toothbrush.
Uncertainty,
your breath stinks.
*e.e. cummings, “i like my body when it is with your body”
pledge of allegiance
Free as in undisciplined, as in formless, uncontained. For, meaning intended, the betrothal of cause to effect. All as in “may all beings know peace.” Yes, even him. And yes, even you.
Free from owning and ownership, take a penny leave a penny, dispossessed peoples of an anarchist moon. For you, this gift of grief, this rotten jar of gritty roots, to soften and soothe. All, like the radical unexceptional acceptance of newborns and the dying.
Free like the poem that saved you, like the text that stopped you. For, as in the fellowship of reconciliation, love revealed and interpreted by forgiveness from sin. All, meaning the sum, the just and unjust, the sun abandoning none.
Free as a story, a you-shaped seat at this table of laughter. For as in due to, as in what we owe each other, which is everything. All as in everyone’s invited, barking carnival cattle dogs herding you precious to the hearth of the heart.
Free just like “I made you some tea,” like my hand is held by yours as my freedom is wrapped up in yours. For, which asks: how long must we wait? All like many, meaning pluralistic pluperfect presence, the indivisible prime number of universal personhood.
Free, meaning not alone, all patches in the quilt and threads in the sweater and holes in the net. For we know not the miles between this world and the new one. All like one, which is what we are, which is all there is which is neither yes nor no but both and and.
Free meaning decriminalized liberty, bound and bonded to brother-sister-siblinghood for the why which is and cannot be anything but love and love and the inexpressible unbounded inequivalent irreplaceability
of all.
beat the clock
I was trying to save time. I ate
the canned soup. I bought my panic in bulk.
I outran the moon, she couldn’t keep up.
I doubled my body. We worked as a pair.
We velcro’d our sneakers. We cut our own hair.
While frothing the solvent of business and pleasure,
I got pulled over for texting and driving,
pausing the mindfulness podcast on 2x speed.
“Sir,
you need
to slow down
Now.”
I’m trying to make time. I’m
s t r e t c h i n g
a minute
like a ham hock in greens.
I’m walking.
I’m talking.
I’m reading out loud. Stepping
out of the office
and into the river (there is
only one). Steeping
mint that I swiped
from the Garden of Eden.
Folding the batter
of motion
and stillness.
It’s three minutes
to midnight:
do you know where your breath is right
Now?
How many heartbeats escape your attention?
The space in between them:
does that count as
Death?
I made some time,
for you.
Here,
take it.
Open the box
that contains a box
that contains a box
that contains a box
that contains
your candle,
lit at both ends.
Blow it out.
Breathe it in.
Now,
cough.
God gets bored
Eternal life is such a curse.
How many trillions of times
and billions of ways
over multiple millennia
will I have to answer the same whiny fuckin’ prayer:
“Why?”
I should have killed that Job in his crib.
“Why do we age, get sick, and die?”
Because otherwise the worms would starve and y’all’d run out of dirt.
It’s a whole system.
“Why did you let us invent napalm?”
Because my portfolio was underperforming and I overindexed on Dow Chemical.
Even God’s gotta eat.
“Why can’t we all just get along?”
Because y’all keep asking obnoxious questions like, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
Because to turn your sorrow into tears
and your tears into rage
and your rage into righteousness
is a daisy chain of miracles.
And because some of y’all are a pack of lies.
Fuck it.
Maybe I’ll spin some tectonic plates, rearrange the continents.
No, they’d just do a colonialism again.
Maybe I’ll send my dirtbag son back down there to shoot dice and flip some tables.
No, they’d probably beat his ass to death with hammers this time.
Maybe I’ll fuck around with the gene pool, get some new species goin’.
No, whenever I try that I just end up with more goddamn crabs.
Maybe I’ll… maybe I’ll…
Maybe I’ll kill Dolly Parton!
“Hard Candy Christmas” is the kid’s favorite birthday song, though,
and out of all the life forms I’ve created, these dumbasses were the first to figure out a croissant.
The fact that they gave Toni Morrison her flowers is a credit to the species,
and I have seen incremental progress
since I stopped speaking to them through burning bushes,
talking donkeys, and burn toast.
I should stick to what I’m good at:
Mississippi thunderstorms,
the opiate relief of canceled plans,
the sun shining down on a newly-divorced woman,
big luscious butts.
I could be nicer to them.
I forget why I made it so hot in the summer and cold in the winter,
and that they rarely figure out what to do with their bodies
until they’re wracked with pain and near decrepitude.
That unless they hold hands, feed each other,
ignore anyone claiming to speak in my name,
live with delusional bravery and spit in my eye,
they’ll never make it.
Maybe those fallen angels have a point.
tacohole dot net 