I grew up either or around at all
times military installations, and this is a poem about that.
"If skin passes always through language,
texture is compelled by desire.
If one scholar writes the length of an afternoon,
then morning opens our chest to another science.
Delicately scaled.
Veined in silence.
I rest my head on the frame of a burning question.
And the future bends down from its fine grained neck,
breathing.
The dominant orientation is based in devotion.
The geography devoted disfigures each wrist.
Veins negotiate a well-marbled music of territory.
Militant routes open to the half drawn beauty of corridors
where the governing image branches with light.
Devastating.
Light passes through a moment which
doesn't mean the moment ends.
The moment continues with clarity.
We therefore will call our transformations
darkness, the proposals for which being precise
and drawn toward the heart.
I release a trigger and rounds emerge, pale wounds
from the berm.
Even this sound of valley impresses.
Even the futures of thorned perennials
bend, always underneath it.
I want language for what the government did to my body.
The officers watched lengths of our street.
Our legs were barely covered, our streets
closed and opened to frame the process of intimate regard.
Arousing, delicately lobed.
Bare repulsion blossoming anything you might ask for.
We studied the houses from their ugly numbered orifices,
the same in Panama, Kentucky as no contractor ever
had another idea.
Hypothetically, I raised my hand.
A bruise redrawn.
Withdrawn from the door jammed with heat.
Heat of a particular style forced open.
Devastating.
The hanging weight.
Concerts of landlessness rehearsed and lesioned blooms.
Their fruit never fully introduced.
Listen to the territory open, the bright hot door.
Daily we waited at the barricaded roads, roads.
The tinted glass of half drawn windows,
having always to be reminded, if you don't stop smiling, I swear,
we watch for the forms through which understanding passed,
proxy to the conditions from which it
emerged, drawing intelligence.
Such a simple thing.
Every story holds a collective body, amorously or otherwise.
The name lost arrives under the knees of an idea.
No, we're going to do it this way.
We're going to fill our lungs up with the darkest juice,
walking to the corner store on behalf of so-and-so drenched
in possibility.
We shaded our curious faces.
The increasing aftermath of repulsion is arrival.
Is a third party contract and every nigga
left holding the bag.
One impression restrained, another
will assume the terminal point.
When we reference this hour, it holds no reward.
Nor does it face away.
The fibrous connective tissue mounts:
Our eyes nearly covered, our legs cold,
we woke with the straightforwardness
of being Black regardless of what happened after.
The order's warm retching fever of-- it is how scale emerges.
If a sentence passes always through landscape
and that landscape is not vacant, texture by this sentence
forms a discursive core.
Psychologically, physiologically.
This scar along my thigh.
And from being broken, a science.
This murderous clarity we cannot withstand.
Listen how the officers have paused for the territory
to arrive.
The darker the berry, the longer there is to wait."