South in the spectrum events. Murderous events. Good South the longer warrior. Not Bad south, unreconstructed warrior. Get ready room, for hell. Untethered hatred. Sky aflame, stars aligned for the non-rational. Desponded map. Down under. A long forgiving. A long forgiving and then reckoning. Long long. Who forgive? Would she? Would they? would he? Mothers and fathers, forgive? Bother and sisters, forgive? See the big picture. Ethno-historical days. A sum. We do holy ritual and turning. We do secular ritual, turning. We continue you, Dear murdered. This is domestic terrorism.

Body holy blackness. Holy holy blackness. Holy holy dark continent in the cross dream of liberation. But there in collective groan longer longer groan, a vision. You want psyche? You cross a world together. Sing of victims and crime. You curse you will not sing. Must not sing. Then must sing, sing the evil down. Sing centuries unmitigated disaster. Rive it. Hundred year plan? Thousand year plan? Withers without your spirit. And all go down. And all and all go down. And white go down. Do something white body, and white go down. And all go down. What genocide. Any room for poetry? And the Navajo poet lowers his head, children, he says, in this time: room for poetry? This time. Sorry sorry sorry hominid. What? This is domestic terrorism.

Walls. Wall you are up against, all all. O it, murder, detail, all of it. Emmanuel, o come. Could tell: rupture, scream. What next? Sing. Could tell it’s over us, wash, come over us. Emmanuel. O come, o come. Leader, minister, senator. Young man dead in his time. Then all lay in blood. Washed in the blood. Unsolved. Rip again. Structure of rip. The architectures that won't work. That rip. That rot. Renewal? Saints in heaven. The disappearing. Erased. All the saints in heaven down on their knees for this.

Apotheosis. The Nine. Assumption of bodies. Too familiar. Lift. Innocents when you go to slaughter. Broke down into violence. Degeneration. Up against and scream. Pressurizing brain, and mount, ghosts begging for light, Mount in the heat. Pile up. Layers of atrocity in the House of the Lord. What law will bind, hold back slaughter of innocents. O you syndicates of samsara breed genocide proud genocide flag of murderer. Insignias and shells of hatred proud to wear by the weak and damned. Room for poetry? This is domestic terrorism.

The Nine: Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45; Myra Thompson, 59.

For rest, for succor, arrive, arrive. When they say never coming, then arrive. Eruption of chaos. Then arrive. Blood and twin to the universe, always, chaos? Arrive. How many guns can you buy today? Locked in a cabin’s chaos, like fever, a cosmos of endarkenment. Mask, mine or yours. Masked in privilege. Turning around as word in the mouth, sobs try to get out. Take off. Sob me a river. Language is biodegradable. Gone south, a dirge south. Rotted man inside takes it down. Legion of terrorism this land. Infernal descents. In-born terrorism. Wake up. Hold it up. Arrive.

Insulated? Never. American soil saturated with the blood of the innocents. These are the holders, will hold. They will. Hold. O blessings, o dark lamb, come. Come. Come. Hold. Come, o dark lamb. Help me Jesus. Help us Jesus. Whatever the way. Hold. Hold. Shake shake these white bodies down. Arise or all go down. And Help us Buddha, help us Yaweh, Help us Mohammed, Help us Brahma, Help us Confucius. Dark Lamb on the way.

sound de-territorializes
weather
and my love clings to you
sings to you
in the “new weathers”
within a tragedy
of the Anthropocene

nothing
not
held hostage
by the hand
of Man

can we resist?
will we fail?
to save our world?

we dream replicas of ourselves
fragile, broken
robotic thought-bubbles

inside the shadow
a looming possibility
this new year
to wake up

could it be?

an anthropoid scared
from the forest
slow in development
now infantilized
much like us

stressed yet
perhaps
ready to resist
this scenario?

the forest made the monkey
& the cave & steppe: the human
and now
what makes us suppler
more human?

climate grief?
a fierce tenderness toward
the destruction of our world?

questions
or actions?

[my love for you
sings for you, world
I’ve got those Anthropocene….
Anthropocene….
blues…..]

Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it's you I love!

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
And give credit where it's due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me
how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed
herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church
which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment,
not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you,
glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope,
stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all
your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To
Richard Barthelmess as the "tol'able" boy barefoot and in pants,
Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck,
Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car
and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage
on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet,
Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers' gasping spouses,
the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer
Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled,
her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon,
its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer,
Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea's yacht,
and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney
from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx,
Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates,
Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls,
Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio
eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining,
and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining
and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell
in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you
and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras
who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines,
my love!
Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays
and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you
as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces
in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night
but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent
you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!

Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—
call it a philosophy of life, if you will.  Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.
Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom
or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought
for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,
would be affected, or more precisely, inflected
by my new attitude.  I wouldn't be preachy,
or worry about children and old people, except
in the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe.
Instead I'd sort of let things be what they are
while injecting them with the serum of the new moral climate
I thought I'd stumbled into, as a stranger
accidentally presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back,
revealing a winding staircase with greenish light
somewhere down below, and he automatically steps inside
and the bookcase slides shut, as is customary on such occasions.
At once a fragrance overwhelms him—not saffron, not lavender,
but something in between.  He thinks of cushions, like the one
his uncle's Boston bull terrier used to lie on watching him
quizzically, pointed ear-tips folded over. And then the great rush
is on.  Not a single idea emerges from it.  It's enough
to disgust you with thought.  But then you remember something
William James
wrote in some book of his you never read—it was fine, it had the
fineness,
the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, yet
still looking
for evidence of fingerprints. Someone had handled it
even before he formulated it, though the thought was his and
his alone.

It's fine, in summer, to visit the seashore.
There are lots of little trips to be made.
A grove of fledgling aspens welcomes the traveler.  Nearby
are the public toilets where weary pilgrims have carved
their names and addresses, and perhaps messages as well,
messages to the world, as they sat
and thought about what they'd do after using the toilet
and washing their hands at the sink, prior to stepping out
into the open again.  Had they been coaxed in by principles,
and were their words philosophy, of however crude a sort?
I confess I can move no farther along this train of thought—
something's blocking it.  Something I'm
not big enough to see over.  Or maybe I'm frankly scared.
What was the matter with how I acted before?
But maybe I can come up with a compromise—I'll let
things be what they are, sort of.  In the autumn I'll put up jellies
and preserves, against the winter cold and futility,
and that will be a human thing, and intelligent as well.
I won't be embarrassed by my friends' dumb remarks,
or even my own, though admittedly that's the hardest part,
as when you are in a crowded theater and something you say
riles the spectator in front of you, who doesn't even like the idea
of two people near him talking together. Well he's
got to be flushed out so the hunters can have a crack at him—
this thing works both ways, you know. You can't always
be worrying about others and keeping track of yourself
at the same time.  That would be abusive, and about as much fun
as attending the wedding of two people you don't know.
Still, there's a lot of fun to be had in the gaps between ideas.
That's what they're made for!  Now I want you to go out there
and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy your philosophy of life, too.
They don't come along every day. Look out!  There's a big one...

Enormous earrings are heavying
             my head
bangs are shadowing
             my eyesight

furthermore I’ve forgotten the art of
the gritty rhyme I see colored motes vaguely
not particular stuff
rubber ducks robots and tigery

shopping bags I wish an eyeful
of fresh air filled
not loaded a truffle
or two of profundity’s okay

for a cat or something as for me
a little cloud sun on the mossy fun