grief (disarmament)
You’re a terrible witness. Wore stage outfits to testimony and upon returning home in search of his remains, you were really hunting down his flesh of guns. There was a suitcase full of firearms in the closet to the right of the front entrance. Part of my inheritance. It’s gone missing. Only the love songs remain, stacked there in a melting spiral hoping to be imbibed. His guns have gone missing. They’ve become a nomadic violence as limber as fire itself when not confined to the mechanical, or not registered to my long-deceased father who is alive somewhere as this set of machines he collected for protection and leverage, a substitute for literacy, made a killing protecting me. Kept them manicured and close like comfort animals. Can they be traced now? Were they confiscated by the police after his arrest, and sold at auction, or held on to like mementos of his lost soul? Did his brothers, mother, sister, cousins get any? Did they for one moment consider that his daughter might return, not in search of a body or ashes or his grave site or soul fragments, but demanding his weapons and instruments, a Yamaha keyboard and a .45? A stack of tapes. A box of bullets. The cloudy amber prescription pill tubes from his nightstand. Barbiturates and high-pitched minerals. Stale lithium the timbre of shrill grocer roses. Might as well imagine the chandeliered ceiling and him shooting the bulbs down as target practice. Orange shag carpet covered in glass shards like the undrawn eyes of a would-be muse, shot down while high on sleeplessness. Speechless, mercurial as light itself. But he was never that reckless. The suitcase of guns he kept in the coat closet was locked, yellow with silver trim and the glint of a childhood raincoat, each rifle coiled inside of it in a fetal serenity, waiting to be needed the way an embryo awaits its turn to unfold. My heart awaits the impossible verdict. Were they sold to white men who perched them against trees like candy canes at Christmas, reducing my father’s intensity to sport? Or is one waiting for me, behind the trapdoor of a future amnesia, as my love for the kind of intimacy that expires as rage? I’ve outgrown that too. The most violent act of my life has been recovery. Now I must reclaim this rudimentary feeling of losing track of an object that never belonged to me, the material scapegoat for a psychic void. And I will take possession of it, so that it releases me how a trembling finger lifts from the trigger of an unloaded scheme. His guns are missing and I yearn for their stunted buttertoned crib, which I could carry around like a briefcase full of his unlived dreams, or swerve above my head like an erratic kite, pretending our day at the beach together. Bluffing until the sky turns fuchsia in embarrassment. Severing my tie with my weapons’ danger so that they come out of me as ornament and beauty, and everybody I once knew is strange and gagged in the closet, a suspect, gone
graft
Though drama can impersonate pain, real pain is uneventful, the process of discovering something that was always there refusing attention, like a monster inside waiting to become you if you don’t catch it first and trade places. Or false modesty switching to dejection when no one corrects it. He used to make the white boys lick his boots at the concert hall before performances. Then he’d borrow their instruments so they couldn’t play anyways like an officer disarms his suspects by exploiting their bravado. This was his subservience taking revenge on itself. His monster saying yes. His way of grieving the funk of their praise before it could tackle and change him. Nothing’s quite as sad as trading tongues in the club that way, fake laughter of bystanders hurling at us like a whip
g/rift
Perhaps a corruption of graft ever after dishonest toil broken work
What ifs that inspire you to switch direction mid deliberation or lament
I can hear the grift machine gearing up again while clapping for it on cue
Also the orbit of a broken verse in half-clap like Dilla sampled from heart to skin surface
Insipid unmapped unbaptized three-fifths and gifted with favor in a swarm oppressive favor
skin first or when we went to the circus and they yelled
Act your age, not your color lift every voice here make a chorus of breaks
Miscreants misremembers embroiled in fluke and fantasy took apart
By their own charade and pretty soon this hallucination sponsorship will come through
Like hit men called to duty but bulky with luck fire on screen does not burn the screen
Your skin stares back at your ending unfazed unchanged hoping the skit resolves before
It smudges the notion of real life burning or teaches passion to behave like luck
A quandary for the vicious theorists who mistake concepts for deeds or fates
all day and when dusk arrives pray to the flickering gasp of fake fire
scentless mute embers of my silhouette which he calls human girl
Until my disillusionment and afterwards monster pusher
Shows me a mirror with his reflection in it and says we made a movie
That it was romantic that I was ticklish and blushing when I had been
Squirming unyielding all the way to Buffalo with the nauseous fumes
Of Chevy leather swollen on my blackened eyelids so purple
trying not to fall asleep in the crime’s dream right at the part where
He declares his innocence and I parody mine for alms twirling wishing
To become the fix of glass that shatters in the back of his mind when I scream
