From the get go, Blacks--
It hadn't rained in three weeks and my jaw
is so tight it clicks like my mother's
heels in the early morning kitchen
every time I try to take a walk.
Indy and summertime's disreputable shimmer
of salt and red spray paint is all
over the recalcitrant drones in this sweaty space, each August
day redoing its former, cooler zones in Section 8 brick,
fatherless masculinities mustached and colorful
progressions of gutter and grin, exhaust pipes hardly
hung out again, scraping glitter from the potholes
unrelentingly, like a refrigerator door in the heat.
And later, when it gets even hotter,
the corrugated need for direction
makes facsimiles on the ball courts, discotheques
of sweaty arms and high top sneakers
is broken and elbowed in some other city's name, one
with air conditioning and deep ended
swimming pools, whistling lifeguards, and four water
fountains even.
I'd swim there, if I knew how.
So my idea of spectacle is decidedly analog.
The personal epiphanies that we used to have
and used to use to anchor poems now
appear in 140 characters, or as GIFs, or Tumblr posts
before they've been given the kind of scrutiny
they might have received to become a verse in a poem.
That's not a bad thing necessarily,
but I think maybe part of spectacle
involves being reckless and being at risk, emotionally.
And it's hard to be the hero in a poem without revision.
I'm talking about taking what the great Nigerian
novelist, Ben Okri, referred to as all
of the secret and public domains of our lives
and presenting them for scrutiny and interrogation.
In other words, we poets and readers
are participating in the spectacle of confession
and myth making, the very thing that Hannah was talking about,
in some ways.
Some of the participation is voluntary.
I can choose to edit, conjoin, or re-imagine, or simply
omit those secret spectacles of my poems
to create a more austere or comfortable narrative.
I can make things up and I can attribute them
to other speakers.
I can make a minor spectacle of myself
and make it more enticing or surprising.
No one says that my spectacle needs
to be an accurate or honest account, it just has to be,
housed in some shape that might create pathos in the reader.