A slightly longer poem and a couple of references for it.
In the Mid-2000, videotaped beheadings
of Western journalists by ISIS and other groups
caused outrage in the US among people at peace
with killing from a distance.
The Tiqqun collective, is an anonymous collective
of radical intellectuals who wrote Preliminary Materials
for the Theory of the Young-Girl,
a book I take issue with.
And of course the question, "Where were you born before
that?" is one that's often put to migrants.
And before that,
I want to talk to you about happiness to stay inside it.
But boys displaced by proxy war are
falling onto the gravel outside my window,
Under the police helicopter searchlight.
The gravel bites through to the knees.
The searchlight is a thing the bars on my window
are promised to.
And the wisdom of the body,
Like articulations of capital through time,
Means some things but not others.
Like the greatest good and feeling, say,
Or how shifting to a news video of a beheading loosens my jaw.
Nature compels cleanliness.
I could aspire to be professional,
Sitting on the toilet and working
a little snot dry and fine,
Tensile for new figuring,
Like I'm the God who knows Mercury shifts shape but never
category.
Offal, organic, decorative,
Maybe those are stages of consequence.
Tended, the snot worked thin as a pencil mustache,
Invites the strangeness of a decorated face
Which might blend with certain American things,
Like shitting without a video is boring.
But where were you born, before that?
Free radicals, the Tiqqun collective for one,
Place themselves at a click past Imperium to turn back
And describe imperium's outlines,
But never their own pose, facial stunts,
A thing being a position and its grimacing.
I mean, I could pair the sass of saying could ultimately,
It's the omnipresence of the new police that
has made the war undetectable.
With a laughter in the closed set of my laughters,
Each coded to a specific aspect, and color, and digital video
charm in the pocket
Watching this one,
I'm learning to thicken the line between inner and outer cop,
So neither might evaporate with a desert's turns
toward the sun and its shielding waxes
on leaves and with its needles.
But where were you born before that?
Forgive me for being so dumb.
With this booger mustache, so dark,
Having carried a little blood at the start.
I guess if you're taken for a man,
The old way was to say whatever other men had said,
Only louder,
So that even dead, you'd be seen,
And the distance from them, your words mark and redeem.
Happy among the released, so tutored, so iterated.
I might think any consoling magic could be an actual turn.
But here in America, the night sky
behaves itself, as ordnance withheld,
So that boys married to their own white father, would
lie in bed,
Hardly saying prepossessed.