I'm going to get on with it now.
Living In, part 2, "In-Sufficiency."
"What do I want you to feel?
The absurdity of that question wanted
you to go, go into immediacy of Hebron's lilac,
doors in the star flash.
To go as what and for what, this poem has removed itself,
effaced its thought, your need for it.
Stand and turn, look toward rain,
saw only iron latticed rain, where
ideas are wrought in metal, where we are not is Hebron.
Clouds descend in squares.
When every optic nerve dissects from sight
to feel the measure of slogan's discordant pull,
precipices, thought's collective voice as each voice finds,
fails its pitch, moments of love,
resistances, both wild and timid, trudged round
lonely in despair, our hands or roads unfurled and flinching,
to thought where altered words might talk engagement's ear
and song, half wrong.
What I don't want is for you to account
for staining yolks of breath, ghosting vocals
in these venues of retreat, writing letters, gauging
witnesses, transnational distances,
love's equivalencies find but our known and mirrored selves
there.
Can there be no more talk of day-rendered specificities,
appatent luminosities?
Can you speak?
Gang cats gathered in heat or died alone by skips
or clawed homes' foundations, wounded arm at dusk
that took up half touristic rhythms playing us
and the streets on goatskin derbakes or Jerusalem's outskirt
taxi-driven roads at night, man turned in fear
to warn against walking up past Mount of Olives
white-tomb promises.
Can't drive to the high hotel.
His politics or mute details have their day
to think in, small January skirmishes, prisoner of love,
looking at them in full and careful earnestness,
stone-thrown land to listen in, no ideas but in Palestine.
Every poem's space yells, go, go to Palestine
and, in sufficiency, live in.
A white goat tired from the drum arches its back out
of its vase-like neck, birthing itself on the sand,
and for a while stands, quiver of whites
on new, uncertain legs.
How do I use these legs when all I felt were hands,
it seems to ask, recalling its old drum life.
Night, as its knees fold down, as its belly follows down,
on the sand, the goat, without sound, gags.
One long line of tape spools from its goat throat.
Shamed by its own obsolescence, goat
decides to die, on the line of tape, the tongue,
on the line of tongue, the cud, cud of multitude's movements,
magnetized lives, decomposed jaw songs play
a poem, intestinal, inland.
Taxi driver stands, seeing naught but a dead goat,
drives away.
Cats just get on with their cat life,
claw away dark that drags away from its own dark self.
Everything that can back away backs away.
You cannot back away.
You back away.
On thin foam of mattress across thin frame of bed,
arms in needles placed behind, supported
by lattice, weight of a backward lean,
back in Palestine with Dawud, reminding him of my brother,
now in Somalia, tasked with clearance of landmines
and securing munitions, mad country director, French NGO.
Dawud's cousin, leant back, took one wistful glance
at the ceiling, said, in Somalia, guns are like bread.
Remember this exchange.
Five days later, interviewed Dawud
about his six years spent in Israeli jails,
cigarette loosely hung between fingers and lips like stars,
told that in Israeli jails, cigarettes were rationed.
You get four cigarettes a day, but a lighter only twice a day.
That was once the way of things.
It was no longer the system used.
Cigarettes are now bought, he said,
but during interrogations, it was
common to be given four cigarettes in the morning
but not to receive a lighter at any point during the day.
But what we used to fix this problem,
he said, and prompted by the unmistakable sound of the flint
on the wheel of his lighter as ignite the gas,
I noticed the complex defiance of his timing, the lighting
of his cigarette, sound that is caught
on the recording I am using to record these exact words.
We make, he said.
We use the paper of the--
bathroom paper, and we take a long one for 2 or 3 meters.
And we roll it in a special way like we do,
like you know, the thing you roll it for the bomb.
Yeah, a fuse, I say.
Yeah, we use it like this, he says.
This is a special way, and not a lot of prisoners can do it.
We roll it, and after that, we burn it from the cigarette.
And it will stay.
You have a fire for a few days, but when,
if they catch, if they catch this thing, they will.
They will not give you cigarettes for two or three
days, but we always like create and discover many things
to make our lives easier.
Can you think of another thing you created in the jail, I ask.
Almost without pause, he responds,
we create chess players from bread.
Yet still to stay and to speak to the fact of the staying,
to the choice to the dying sustain that
echoes the sound of a note that is staying,
bread, her head that forces a stone in her hands
is that staying, memory of sand in the flag in the barb
that is staying, rooms full of poets that listen and stay
is what's staying, the need of the walls and the floors
and the logic of glass, the flesh that has structured
the sound of this staying.
To stay and to speak to that sound
is the feeling of loss that is staying.
You can't feel.
You can't feel anything, just your mind working,
and all sections of your body like
you are a dead, a dead man with a working mind.
And the fuse on the floor that stays the light
is what's staying.
This sentence that binds to my mind
is the lilac on doors of his staying.
So alternate between sounds Palestinians, Somali
make in my mouth.
Recall likeness Dawud's cousin saw between Somali guns,
the ubiquity of Palestinian bread,
how toilet paper becomes a fuse, how bread
facilitates games of chess.
On the land-flung torso of itself,
what sure thing can you find beyond the ballad exchange
of orange for grape read olive, to see in advance how pieces
move with metal guns, bleeding gums of yeast,
to measure the process of occupation's counterpoint,
force that turns a screw on value,
how a dwindled fuse of the paper turns preservation, dignity,
cunning, nation in all this imprisoned overdubbed time?
And what you mistake for the length of my breath
is the slow, persistent clench of a fist.
Be agile, friend.
Press on, your translator gone, has not arrived.
The poetry workshop will follow the path of the wall.
Gardens, your destination, cost money to enter.
Class structures this place like it has done others.
They don't have much, but they have something,
drawing your maps, your plans for poem maps on lawns.
We've come out here to think about space,
you say, why certain things have been counted,
why certain other things have not.
Sweep arm in wide gestures to white shekel distances.
In front of you, however, there grows
a long, uncomprehending silence, undeniable
as the space between one thump of a heart and its next.
It is this breath that breaks.
I am at Qalandiya.
I am in Qalandiya.
I, too, am of Qalandiya, another says.
I am in Haifa.
I remain at home.
I am the whole of Tel Aviv, and I, the countless wings
of birds, another says.
I, Nablus, Hebron, Khan Yunis.
I am at Qalandiya, another says.
I come to share our suffering and pain caused
by the neoliberal system.
I come to share valuable knowledge, our experiences
in struggle and organization, our goals and challenges.
I am in Qalandiya, another says, I,
that the Palestinian people will resist and will rise again,
that they will once again begin to walk,
and that they will know then that although we
are far away on the map, I, that the peoples embraced them today
as we have before, as we always do, with our collective hearts.
I am of Qalandiya, another says.
You, in this long and uncomprehending silence
that was once drawn onto their faces
and which now grows undeniably to fall across yours,
begin to rip your ears, which are the first to cave,
followed next by your eyes.
This workshop is not going at all well for you, whispers one.
I am at Qalandiya, another says.
Your lack of language begins to weigh more heavily
in your throat, apple of stone, until under the weight of it
all, you fall to the floor.
What is left of those white ears bleed red, press, and ground.
You hear something resembling speech.
Perhaps it is the code sound of slaughtered goats.
I am in Qalandiya, says one.
I am of Qalandiya, another says.
From a concealed pocket, they pull
copies of some old document, leaves,
which decaying, with your still one half-good eye,
you try to read.
On it, a flock of black-headed gulls
dusk over serif cliff's glare.
I am the Balfour Declaration, says one.
I am in Qalandiya, another says.
In rain, the past goes gorge.
You, left with a flare of nagging thought,
do not say, I must love what I will never believe in twice,
echoes Day.
You read Genet, says Day.
That's not Genet, you try to say,
as Day shoves your barely breathing corpse complicity
into the back of a taxi that, as always from your love,
peels away, who from 1970 onwards
spent two years in Palestinian refugee camps
in Jordan, who recalls in the book which
details the experience a conversation he
had with the fedayeen.
Whenever Europeans looked at us, their eyes shone.
Now I understand why.
It was with desire because their looking at us
produced a reaction in our bodies before we realized it.
Even with our backs turned, we could feel your eyes drilling
through the back of our necks.
We automatically adopted a heroic and therefore attractive
pose.
Legs, thighs, chest, neck, everything
helped to work the charm.
We weren't aiming to attract anyone in particular,
but since your eyes provoked us and you turned us into stars,
we responded to your hopes and expectations.
But you turned us into monsters, too.
You called us terrorists.
We were terrorist stars.
In the back seat of a car at night, Day gets real quiet.
When all the stars are drones, Day just lets them talk.
I am in the car with you, friend, of terrorist stars.
Dawud is to my right, and it is 10:00 PM in occupied Palestine.
This friend was with me in prison.
I met this man in prison, too, then pointing
to the man in the front.
This man was the head of Fatah in prison.
A good person to learn from, then, trying not to stir Day,
I coolly say.
Yes, he says, catching the reference to what
he had said the previous day.
He had received his true education in the prison.
I, telling you what Dawud had told me
while he was chained to the honor chair,
a mirror had been left in the room.
It had been known for the mirror to be used as a punchline
to a joke.
If and when the prisoner falls asleep,
the mirror is moved closer to their face, so when you wake,
you get a bad surprise.
So simple, but very hard on the prisoner.
Jaw wired, I laugh without sound in Palestine.
During this, I slide in beside you,
furnishing his words in the wound of your ear,
face turned to yours, slowly turning to reflective glass.
On waking, you see you.
You are now your own eye.
I say, was I ever actually there in that car
with those prisoners that night in Palestine?
Mouth of clogged bread.
This life has this quality of glimmering absence.
Even lies shine out the truth in them,
registers a violent shift.
Escalations give no sound.
Relation, the words need more.
Absence, filled by past burdens of proof
that any property was not absentee, fell upon its owner,
displacement the present mass of this absence.
Here and there, precise and chance locations,
absence smashed out of presence, poem
a distrustful displacement, resisting
to sounding history's presence, though it
is part of the absence.
What sounds balanced gives no permit to balance.
Violence sculpts its own reality.
Offcuts observed turn memory, no speaking on behalf of.
Blood current's far-off surface speed off.
Solutions are foreign to its constituents, mirrors to all
that we are.
We are throwing stones on the street, if manufacture, ground.
Saleh, my friend, throwing the stones,
if researched, copper, lead, or steel.
We were in the street throwing stones.
It was a game.
If taper, primer, propellant, division of labor, not here,
round there, round the corner, if before flight, mold.
I saw the soldier here, there, here in the tower.
If there is assembly, firm seating.
Wee Saleh was on the street throwing stones,
if there is length, crimping.
Soldier had a sniper.
I saw the sniper.
If there is moisture, failure of ceiling.
I could tell because it was long.
If there is feed, primer is flush.
I told Saleh, don't throw stones.
The soldier has a sniper.
If there is flight, correct charging.
Saleh did not listen.
He did not listen.
If quality control, correct sequence.
He came around this corner to throw the stone.
If alteration, check barometric pressure.
I heard some soft thing thud.
If slight deviation, adjust for humidity.
I did not hear.
I did not hear no thing.
If vibration, see wind on the casing.
Saleh was on the ground.
If mushroom expansion, possible cavity.
I did not go up to him.
I saw his head.
If expansion and cavity, multiple pathing.
If pathing unrecorded, then this is the difference
between the blood on the stone and the blood
that he saw on the stone.
When I lied to you, I was a flex of steel cloud.
Difference between-- I saw the blood on the stone,
for it is not here for you to see it.
And I saw the blood on the stone because you were not
here to see it, the blood that I saw on the stone
and the blood that was there on the stone.
In the incoercible perfumed streets that I am,
the difference between the blood that was there on the stone
and the blood he said he saw on the stone
because you were not here to see the blood he said
he saw on the stone or the blood that was there on the stone,
and the blood he said he saw on the stone and the blood that
was there on the stone is not here for you to see it.
Before crimson trauma, I claim this, my liar's right,
for the blood that was there on the stone
said I saw the blood on the stone,
for the blood that was there on the stone
and my blood that wasn't there on the stone for us
to see or not to see it.
The blood was there on the stone, and I saw it.
We flew in the cell of our skin, braces locked on teeth.
This was the truth Zayid told.
Whatever you want, you can have, as he worked out his story
as he walked past the wall.
Before all manufacture, there are grounds.
After the workshop on space, protest comes to the camp.
The arc of the tear gas was the glee on their faces,
a dance in the scream of the street.
Now Day is lost somewhere in Ramallah,
glinting off the head of an iron boy
who climbs in static to a flag that absent over life
that feels much like normal life but is not normal life.
Protest comes to the camp.
The one lie is sharp when soldiers invade over
Palestinian graves, using them for cover, the dead,
their stones that watch.
This is literal.
Protest comes to the camp.
The one lie is sharp.
Tires burn to block, in hazy curls
of smoke, the sun, the sight of the shooters,
ghost at that point and kneel to shriek at the gate
or run back to the high gate of their coming.
The one lie is sharp, standing in light's fast thrashes,
reading, doing something, or sweating alone so long,
doing nothing, so long, so long to an end,
to an end of no other, save colonial circle's capital
concrete, the wall of so long, bereft of ideas,
living to itself, cut off from the people,
undermined by its own hereditary incapacity
to think in terms of all the problems of the nation
as seen from the point of view of that nation.
Tick that sucks on a just cause, the continual,
yells as its one true desire to borrow
in the earth of the people, in quickening pupils,
so long to justly hack at throat and skin,
so long as there are managers living out or living in
in the end.
In the end, it was an honor for me to be one of the prisoners,
from the Palestinian prisoners, and it was an honor for me
to be the first prisoner from Aida Camp in this intifada.
It was an honor to sit in the interrogation chair.
It is an honor chair."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]