BURIAL
OCEAN
Water Bearer
Seventeen
Hollow Delta

BURIAL

Thousands of militants in the streets
Want to cum in ecstasy
More than the government’s will to strangle them
Thousands of prisoners want to be free
And to taste air on skin
In the remnants of the carceral state
Burning, still smoking at dawn
When we're all free

In defense of demons
We build your walls
So that you can be the last white man
To die within it

OCEAN

As dust catches us
Water clings to us, making everything coagulate together
Death calls the border running along drenched spines of passageways
It's the liquor that fills our brain
As long as there is a drop of blood left in the body
There can be a state of matter
It's capital that sputters in our gestational tracts
alerting us to spells unknown, unseen ghosts in the dark,
the devil card, and ultimately, a new aborted world
in the shape of dying cow belly
Feeding us nothing, that we could not find.
This is abandonment in the purest form,
this is the coldness of indifferent serenity
This is our comradeship at the end of inaugurations
and the passing of garlands
A queen appears, at her feet is scrawled
"You have nothing. Turn your back to the cold."
History happens upon the flesh, sitting
waiting to be introduced to mob theory
Whether it's our world
versus
The barking of indolent dogs
begging for the world to end in the shape of their image

Not waiting for fascism to die
Instead holding my mouth open
And crushing the state under my mandible
Letting acidic fists do the rest
Collecting each flag until they become as adorned
As the bodies that continue to die for democracy

Only in the dark could I scream that something was wrong
Because my friends lit a fire on a flag
that hung my body with rope
We cut that rope
from the intestines of the hierophant,
the father, the family, the state,
the money and the cop
Then got born

Water Bearer

Philly is a border town where drawls pull down
and memory is sewn to stone basements
and railway stops to the stars
People lived and some people died
Some didn't have a place in either world
That nowhere and everywhere is home
For the people who don't have a name in the street
Bastard names in the street

If we're here then that means someone didn't just survive but resisted
That somewhere someone fought against assimilation,
that someone was a trickster spirit submerged in flesh
and powered by the vitality of the moon, that someone
somewhere ensured that more deviants could exist and
continue to burn a new world, that someone
somewhere ensured that we would be loved for our most vulnerable self,
that someone somewhere wove spells in flesh
that could be used and broken, that someone
somewhere ensured that we could taste life
with no fear and that it could dare to be delicious
And that it's right,
and makes us move stealth against night,
searching and breaking borders and alienation
Channeling time
Rushing water in the ditches we've been building

Seventeen

Commodity commodity
It's the black commodity
Corrosive commodity
Burns through tin and aluminum
In my hair commodity
Black commodity
Holding animality
White girls can understand, it's close enough to the dog commodity
It fits in your bag, made to be in your life
In the company of fetish

In which panel do I get to be Fred Moten or
Frantz Fanon, so that you can think my words are pretty too?

I want myself against everything, 
stay there and be burned into the mind
Into the mind

So god
So god, so good
Got soggy on my way here
But
So god
If your church isn't handing me a metro card,
Then why isn't god saving our souls from capital
This truly is heaven on earth

Heavy energy
Heavy life
Death in
Mundane out

My lover comes bearing coins
And I always know what time it is

Death and war all by my side
A year with pulse
A year of dead teenage girls
In jails
Black oil snakes
So good, so god
The end and un end
Everyone is learning how to drink poison

The darkness of the south
The blindness of the north
The grand delusion of it all

A hung moon

time of all time has ended
with what is a poor substitute of equity

sometimes death isn't even enough to make good on past grievances
sometimes suffering for god isn't summed up in embracing the graveyard

time of timed boundaries has ended
it began on the edge of a fence in a great hall exclaiming to no one in particular
"watch me light myself on fire and burn for you”
as I tell about this story stingy lovers
or how about we did embrace the tomb
or how about we did win by losing
or how about “yeah, man, i'll miss you when you leave this city”,
and how we can't pronounce the word 'touch' or
"i need you now. but no, don't come over, i'm exhausted"
but of course we settle for private property as an alternative because false gods taught us well

Everything is a joke with time
in time, around it, scalping up roots that were supposed be to buried in our stomachs

I'm traveling along time to make up for time wages
lost wages in negative time
the kind without growth
the kind without organs
body time
This internal clock breaks for you
but others will call it the selling of labor power
labor power meaning desperation at the term "electoral activism"
perverted time, obtuse because

I want to fight and care for friends at this edge of time
explosion of Saturn time
looking for soul in a leather jacket

I chose not to sleep through time
this time
the suffering made things feel more possible
I'm going nowhere fast, all of our secrets about the world
aired out at this exact moment together

Walking diagonally speaking to God
Hoping the night doesn't eat too much of me
In the absolving night of time
Falling upwards longitudinally through history where mosquitoes
grow living in the crochet text-flesh of our friends
Praying that it flows into what could be the constellation of bond
Strong enough
Lighting a fire in the woods, hoping something good will see it
Hoping it’s good enough for them
Telling us through the fire to use the sword to our advantage,
built in the blood of travel of the fool's journey

Running wet under the moon
Teaching myself how to cauterize a wound that's decades old
Licking away at a curse that isn't even mine to hold
On left handed coasts we lie
about how our bodies learned how to say hello
How we wanted to be in the light
In the dark
How we whisper things better left unsaid
because everyone is searching for life and meaning
Everyone is in crisis and we just fell into the trap
We just wanted to experience death without it being mortal
We wanted to fail and believe there was a hereafter
And that there is something beyond blood and cum
something beyond being a vampire
Something beyond dead
Even beyond that because then
there isn't even infinity and if there is, math couldn't count it
We lit a fire and everyone saw
The world ended and we still chose to live in it

Hoping for no return

Hollow Delta

Freedom in capital can be measured in furloughs.

Diagonally, the lovers have merged with The state
The scene has merged with the state
The scene, like the barricades
Cannot hold
Out against Saturn
But who will pay the price?

Suicide happens by proxy
We get a dose of it in our feeds
Keeping us enraptured, utterly broken-hearted
Lonely like god

We lost in school

We lost in the hospital
And all that was given was haldol
Because the voices we were hearing
Were loud
And external
Telling us:
"Struggle is gradual. Don't you want to function?"
But my body was in pain now
With my heart slipping out my anus
Because my sphincter got too weak from
The stress of holding shit in

We lost in church
Because the preachers, pastors, clergy all are silent
When black women are murdered by ex black police officers
And black on black crime becomes null
Because this about lost masculinity
There it is
A hum of
"And the church say: AMEN"

We lost in work

We lost our romance
When we don't have to leave the house to be killed and murdered by the passion of our lovers
Because we can't submit, so we are beaten because only the abuse of our corpse can be proved innocent and worthy of love

I can tell you how this story should end
Something like
The middle passage reciting on Tuesday under a blood moon,
Whispering:

I know people who would’ve been happy to just taste the sun once
Really

But this should be the true ending
We should repeat and fuck to:

If Black Lives Matter, then that means the destruction of America.
The entirety. That vibrates deep down into the core of earth, to emerge and destroy Europe and the imaginings of it.

I'm the angel knocking on yr door
To let disease in
The place that I fit in doesn’t exist,
Until I destroy it.
 

Published May 2017.