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Derrida/Coleman

Were it possible, I would be naked. Of the nude philosophy:
consider the globalization of the expensive american sound.

Should we worry? We should work. I believe you’re right.
I distrust the word “white.” It’s sanctified propaganda.

Repetition is my language of origin, the highest technology. Anyway
the body is only mine provisionally. For reasons that I’m not sure of,
I am convinced that before becoming music, music was only a word.

I prefer to destroy the composer, renew the concept.
Extraordinary limitation playing freedom.

Taylor Johnson is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020).

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About this Poem

“I improvised upon a 1997 interview between Jacques Derrida and Ornette Coleman, the PDF version of which I read was an english translation of the interview which was transcribed into french from the original audio of english. I was trying to play out Coleman's concept of harmolodics. In the interview, Coleman describes the brain as ‘a conversation.’ And I like when Derrida asks, ‘What is the strategy of your musical choice for Paris?’ I wanted to see what kind of conversation could happen if I put Derrida and Coleman in one head. Sometimes the language turns on itself, and turns itself over. Listen to ‘Civilization Day’ off The Complete Science Fiction Sessions.”
—Taylor Johnson

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W 177th & Broadway

All night you eyed the man I wanted to be;
my jaw flexed tight. Anger slipped into
desire. Easily he would rise. Easily you would
disperse, pleasure made into light:
what you want under him,
I put on to amuse—I, your worked
supplicant. Yes, love is looking away.
My desire greened in your dismissal. Was

Taylor Johnson

2020

Club 2718

Because I don’t have the juice or enough gold anything to enter, a room that occasionally exists inside of me is the poorly lit dance floor of Club 2718. Thirst is a way of knowing, not knowing. I was on a gin fueled hunt for big asses and music I could cry to. A woman almost twice my age asks where I’ve been and she shuts the door. Like any american what haunts me is my addiction to private property, not time or blackness. I want to love no one in particular the way I say I love my woman when she’s in the doorway and mad at me.

Taylor Johnson

2018

Nocturne

What was rampant in me was not wisteria. Perhaps decay, or loss of reflection.

No one like me gets old, or so I thought, even as I watched the days fade into each other.

Was I no one? Which phrase means a grown-up girl: mica-gilded; pure myth; gone?

Thoreau might say I was trying to find the door to nothingness, that the wild was already in me.

Taylor Johnson

2017

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Derrida/Coleman

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