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I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
That feeling of my soul getting yanked
I wonder where my soul hides when I’m sick
My heart feels as if it’s getting beat up
Is it because the restless ocean is clumping up?
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you —
Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.
Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
He makes the Moon say something new every night
to his deaf son who slurs his speech.
You’ve changed.
You used to be so
and now you’re all
like, you’ve transformed
I don’t know how to describe
it’s like
you don’t like canasta anymore
you text IN ALL CAPS
Source of echo
madman of prophecies
buffering nonsense
in absence of anything
solid as a cloud
flung
from the womb
pale pallid asteroid
belt of nanny goat
From youth I was taught that fresh meant alive
until the moment you buy it My mother
His beard: an avalanche of honey
an avalanche
of thorns. In a bar too close to the Pacific,
It was clearly understood,
there was no ownership of land,
so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.
My water from the river and my nitrogen,
a buffalo protein.
It turns out there wasn't a door, so she stood looking at the wall, and then
at the ground, and then again at the wall, and then about the sky. The sky
was doorless, which was comforting, especially at night, when she could
Poems about night
and related poems. Paintings
about night,
sleep, death, and
I'll tell you how it was, what she remembers:
the scent of rhubarb and strawberries in the wild
where she hid and the cries of the murdered,
they do not want to die away. If possible,
I left the protection
of my plan & my
thinking. I let my self
go. Is this the hope I
thought. Light fled.
We have a world
to lose I thought.
Summer fled. The
some ekphrastic evening, this will be both criticism and poetry and
failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between. this both/
and and/ or neither/ nor machine comes in having been touched
in the broadest conception
of black music, which is the
truest conception of black
music, black music can't be
conceived. a music of covers,
black music covers, and cover
Twenty-four years agoI tried to kill myselfbut with my usual incompetencedid not manage to.
queen of great britain and ireland, by her commissioners the
honourable david laird, of winnipeg, manitoba, indian com
i know she wants me
by her side in sleep. i do not really ask her to stay,
only imply she is invited. i speak
This is a prayer for the dead and dying -
and those that may never know a life on the outside
I hope your sins don’t meet you at your grave -
I am the Smoke King
I am black!
I am swinging in the sky,
I am wringing worlds awry;
I am the thought of the throbbing mills,
I am the soul of the soul-toil kills,
this is the growing of things birthing of skin
and bone stem and leaf this is planet
earth beneath snowlight and desert sand
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
the task given to me when all
the ice had melted was to
welcome the sky people to
the river and to show them
how to fish and how to
build a fire to warm
themselves.
I moved on and came across
I have so many now.
There’s one where we were giants, playing with our size by falling over
houses and trees, laughing.
There’s another where I was racing the old ones in a game, and we stopped
a heart a heart
a diamond a diamond
a club a club
call it invasion not settlement
call it genocide not colonization
call it theft not establishment
don't call January 26 Australia Day
Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!
Shots rang out on my street today
Three Black yoots lay dead
shot inna dem head
The woman I love
braids her hair. She’s Eve
and Eve means breathe, to give life,
my wife, from Eva by way
of the Hebrew havah. At dusk
I unlock her hair
commencing to the place of beginning;
emptying;
in 1959 the South Saskatchewan river was dammed;
forever altering the boundary of Treaty no. 6;
it is friday. we have come
to the paying of the bills.
all week you have stood in my dreams
like a ghost, asking for more time
but today is payday, payday old man;
my mother’s hand opens in her early grave
I
some towers are made of cladding
some made of ivory
some burn in the night
some built by slaves
wind rushes through coarse hair
Do you believe in the ghosts of aunties and uncles that drive old sin-
gle-bench pickup trucks spotted with bullet-hole rust, sweetgrass and
Once, I slapped my sister with the back of my hand.
We were so small, but I wanted to know
how it felt: my hand raised high across
the opposite shoulder, slicing down like a trapeze.
I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University.
I have discovered something, an entirely new species
with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy
with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided
a girl between two dialects
still a screen and still a searching, learns
the season of breakup
another word for spring
can come before or after
depending on where you grew up
online, back and forth
let the colonial borders be seen for the pretensions that they are
i hereby honour what the flow of water teaches us
the beauty of enough, the path of peace to be savoured
“Morning of goodness to you”
— “Morning of goodnesses”
Or add flowers: “morning of roses”
Always multiply the gift—
“welcome” to “two welcomes”
“a hundred welcomes and kinship and ease”
1. you are perfect
& also flawed
2. you are allowed to make mistakes
& you must be accountable for them
3. accountability is not a price you pay in blood
for being human
we are asking you to trust your hands. put them on your heart. trust
your heart. hear what we are saying. trust what you hear. we are
asking you to build a circle. always a circle. not almost a circle. face
I.
It’s the season of wine, meadows, and Rose
The court of spring is cleared of choughs and crows
Generous clouds now water Rey[1] more freely than Khotan[2]
On moonlight night
when moon is bright
Beware, Beware—
Moon-Gazer man
with his throw-back head
and his open legs
gazing, gazing
up at the moon
To Windrim or sycamore
rustle cicada or bark and to Wayne
Where did the handsome beloved go?
I wonder, where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go?
He spread his light among us like a candle.
Where did he go? So strange, where did he go without me?
The Dictator’s Message
O poets
return,
we have swept
your homeland clean
of thorns and splinters
O writers
to make a record of your works
The little girl is innocent
they’ve put henna on her hands
they’ve plaited her hair beautifully
they’ve put kohl round her eyes
they’ve dyed her eyebrows
We haven’t travelled to this door
For wealth or mastery,
We come here seeking refuge from
Misfortune’s misery.
And we have journeyed all this way,
May our weapons be effective feminine inventions that like life.
May we blow up like weeds, and be medicinal and everywhere.
May the disturbed ground be our pharmacy. May the exhausted
The ancestors of everyone I’ve let into my body
are gathered in a small room with one window,
no lights. Yes, the room is crowded. Yes, there
are no chairs. Yes, they are talking. Why are we
Am I a praise poet or a blame poet?
Today I am a blame poet.
O Death, face it, existence
doesn’t like you.
You can’t sing. You can’t paint.
Stranger, who can measure the distance between us?
Distance is the rumor of a never-before-seen sea.
Distance the width of a layer of dust.
Maybe we need only strike a match
