Trigger Warning
for Dionne Brand
You have provided the indelible prognosis, so know this:
four men in suits and silk
ties play bocce ball
on a corporation’s lawn, limning
freeway, where the desire
for the person who just cut you off
to flip into the ditch spreads like bird flu, all
blood, bones, shards of glass lodged in steaming
offal:
A prognosis of sickness – a culture that devours
good intentions and shits out evil, a sickness
that shivers in a dark hole of churning acids,
stinging, where seven-eyed monsters eat
our names and regurgitate harried aliases,
anthrax on paper, poison gases in Fallujah,
the hiss of chemicals accompanies calls to prayer and
still the beautiful
music plays on
echoing through empty streets that
remember landmines and machine
gunfire.
Your refusal to soothe is the only humane response, the
halo of an impurity
that jabs its crooked dagger into purity’s
stanzas, its evacuated halls without a ceiling.
I say let the rains fall, people
will hurt you and smile in your face but
that’s ok;
every one hurts and twos these days
are difficult to maintain:
a pair of eyes, lids exhausted by hustles
too moldy to be approved of; a pair of ears
too dusty to hear motes wiggle
to music of the spheres; a pair of feet
that walk, rest, walk, rest, accumulate the memories
of movement that settle into gravity’s slumber;
a pair of tibiae too steel-enforced to ever be
broken again, a pair of arms that
let these words be a spongy embrace
to soak up our pain;
weapons to fire against the asbestos
edifice.
A stranger’s penetrating eyes, the
smell of sulphur in the mall, pell-mell the
exoskeletons hurry
about Dundas square, awaiting the next
shooting, the misread surfaces, an excel
billboard
bright but too encrypted to fissure.
They all skid towards guard rails,
sentinels against tranquility.
A school of mackerel flicker in shallow
sunlight and a barracuda
swims through them like Moses
through the red sea; drones collect
sweet pollen for the hive, each
octogon a condominium
obstructing our view of the lake,
our level playing field. Our Hyde
selves sing the angry hurt to counteract
the johnny-on-the-spot aroma of money.
Piss and shit stained clothing hanging on the forgotten
bodies of the war-torn,
citizens of failed states, and they failed
because someone filed off the fingerprints
of the CIA’s training ground personnel.
A revenge tragedy plays out
in that blue light you see darting about
in living rooms
as you walk by them,
and there, photons become letters in
an alphabet we all learned to
recognize, but never to pronounce.
How do I give these experiences I’ve had to you?
Everyone has advice to give
tales to tell, but no one has the time
to listen; the open ear becomes
a commodity precious as the ivory
inlaid legs of
that psychiatrist’s couch.