2 Poems
[ampersand ::: & how many times]
& how many times we have peeled each other off the floor tear-streaked & limp in the limbs. Hypervigilance eats me, a formless melisma of griefs. These are the days of ambivalence toward bearing empathic inundation. Curating our souls an untenable & necessary task of constellatory wiring, upending the fictions of our solidity through every way I feel you & feel you feeling me—how will we bear the music of it? Do not let the grid of your feed fool you, the archive there is incomplete. The family heart wails in me before catastrophe arrives. I was less explicit before but let me say it. We are seasons of clairvoyances in motion. Seeing our untimely deaths before they happen, in a way, but can stop nothing of it. The dead warn me to turn left when I thought right, & there at the so-called benevolent hand, swerves the distracted wheel. Life flashing in the eyes, but still life. I always & everywhere feel alien, save for in the arms of beloveds. Never was human enough.
& child me, staring at Alnilam like I’d been left behind. Forest in my hungry hours of face to the damp & mushroomed earth asks, who sent you, so ravenous & liquid at the skin? Today, lavender, kava root, rhodiola in my veins. A tenderness of animal in me burrowing in the dark. But it is you who meet me under moon. You, also ravenous & liquid, formless inundation finding your way. You afraid of lightning, you with a funeral in your brain. Bedfellows in the illness that comes from submitting to annihilations, for their better & worse. & you & you & you. Destroyed by the horrors small & large as much as by the immense & unbearable wonder. You who believe in miracles not as the hallowed acts of the anointed but the reaching moving, weaving together of our speculations, & oh the things that make us dig in deep & at times, a little carelessly
[ampersand ::: & all chemical bond electricity]
& all chemical bond electricity, affinities into temporary formations of molecules or crystals, fleeting encounters or meetings to face the world together. Minuscule revolutions every millisecond. These fugitive longings & otherworlding, another covalence into accomplice. Hands blur into aurora borealis as these selcouth feathered eyeball angels to awake: what is it to awake? Not woke in political perfection, but everywhere extended & alive to the bond. A magic held in carbon, infinite numbers of biochemical transformations, extending & extending, always reaching in reach. Autistic frequencies by the beat of our own drummer. Fae fluttering against the clutter, the weather of neat retaliates against our morphological & morphing unruly. Every move I make a bond effort amidst untenable musics alienating the storm from bloom. Before conquistadors & heterosexuality, an old song sings I marry you & means I bond in the bond with you, means your difference is a mattering I carry dear to my ampersanding ampersand. Strangeness of form a prayer: thank you gods for varying the creatures. Candles lit for peculiar. Rosemary in the doorway to ward off eugenic homogeneity. O, make room to romp in the rain. Ecstatically. Ex-stasis, the being outside itself in the standoff of forces, a removal to elsewhere. As Maori language for this wiring: in our own time & space. Rhythms yet unborn & bearing. Ampersand is word for bond, temporary formation of electricities constellating to wild musics. Coruscating intimacies as invitation to with with me, softly, darkly, as lightning & liberation atmosphere. Convulsive rebellions alive-ing us to each other, to the multiversal expansion, to the many many suns warming our bloods.