Poem-a-Day

Of these stanzas, prose and materials, some will need the attack of song; some will crackle along the clouted grain of lo-fi; like staring at the sun, some would blind you if you didn’t  turn away, others their sun-green blotter afterimages; some show the mock of law within the  letter of the law, the law gone intense with lawlessness, as the sponge—intensifies with blood—soaking up the cell’s red smear; some will be the documents of this wet-work, albeit  redacted to the point of impunity, others under erasure will disclose the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth;

some will be set against surveillance, now done in billions and billions of operations, the scale of computations astronomical, algorithm and star-law; some will set the saying of the situation at the lyric/anti-lyric ledge, since negation may reverse into pleasure, not into  affirmation—and the book must (still) give pleasure, right?—some record pain, some chorus  it; others the spleen; some try and chart the way. 

So the constellation through negation, since we’re stuck with night.

And because we find ourselves, in medias res, out under the field of data-points—like stars;  because somewhere in the blank spaces of the data-set, the black-site prisons ghost detainees; because there are facts numbered like stars—like stars—or a catalogue of evidence (for a court that will never come); because every idea is a sun, and every sun is a star and every star a sun, because there they are, the falling stars, the fallen suns and numbers, right there  on the floor of the Grand Palais—but what good is the sublime, even the sublime halt and rupture now? 

So the constellation for navigation: Polaris, Ursa Minor, Southern Cross, star-script (with  Mercury in retrograde).

Left with the political imaginary of the book, caught between brackets and barricades, a (new) romanticism—and so what if it is—where critique is protest, and protest vision—vision and star-cant.