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Small Plans 4.22.18

What does not hide from us we quickly forget, refusing to tend to the unattended who show up early, quiet, knowing not to deliver language. They’ve heard of people cutting off tongues. Some crimson, some plum spills out of the mouth. No aaaoooooooow. No way to put the body back together. No one remembers how to bury the dead. Lay the body on the floor in front of the dwelling. The sun can still kiss skin that no longer moves; but this will not fill the lungs. The light remains.

#small plans

Black Painting, Kerry James Marshall

It Made Sense...Mostly In Her Mind, Amy Sherald

The Artist and His Mother, Arshile Gorky

#wakework #paintings #conditionaltime

Wake Work & Conditional Time

To write a play about “wake work” (1) and wake workers, time must be total, as total as the event that led to the necessity of this line of work in the first place. Event not “even close to being the right word,” becomes more adequately understood as a “durational field.” (2,3) Time--inadequately, a collection of events--turns into duration. Time becomes endurance. This, the act of enduring, is a condition. Condition demands reflection. How does one endure? Why does one keep enduring?

(1) Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

(2,3) Moten, Fred. Black and Blur

#wakework #dramaturgy #conditionaltime

Small Plans 5.11.17 #2

been a while knock knock knock on the tomb door did not know what I let loose tried to listen closely in the room all alone what she said there was first love in the mirror and then the alphabet and then a crack drown skin cool and blue from the bloat

#Small Plans #poetry #game

Small Plans 5.11.17

Walked home stem by stem with no help from you. Still gone. Walk without the expectation of shadow. It’s dark and so very boring. A miracle to make the bed and yet to she still spreads her hands, still smoothes the wrinkles from the sheets. Waits for him to fail at the embrace so she can look away each time he doesn’t try again.

#Small Plans #poetry #games

Dear Carlos,

I can hardly say how grateful I am to be walking alongside you in this season, just three years after we first met. It’s never felt like I’ve known you my whole life; but it has always been clear to me that we were meant to meet in the moment we did. Our individual proclivities for abysses along with our four sockets holding eyes weary of disaster have ebbed in the way of outrage and flowed in the direction of relief in this primordial sea of art making we’ve committed to. No matter how much our thoughts and inclinations convene or diverge—you coming from an imaginary concerned with exile, me coming from an imaginary concerned with home—at least one of our questions has remained constant and shared: How are we (as in proximate bodies) supposed to live (as in more than exist) after all (as in history, as in consequence, as in time)?

How you’ve chosen to (re)visit this question in The Utterances is at once deeply challenging and strangely sensible, calling for a reorientation of the corporeal, language, and time. In a year as technologically advanced as this 2017, you’d think we’d be able to, with the assistance of all our books, words, and toys, find ways to imagine beyond instances of personal catastrophe. After all, the scale of catastrophe is always collective; that’s literally how big it is, encompassing completely. Catastrophe is so total. And yet, our feelings, our ideas, our problems, our solutions concerning any catastrophic event are always so private, individual, small. What an awful reminder of how human we are.

I think of our running joke: I scream, “I don’t even like theater!” You laugh. But then I’m reminded of your question. It seems there is no art form better suited to utter a response to such an inquiry begging an actual “us” to forge ahead in the opposite direction of injury. How terrifying (and opportune) that the first step of this possibility is to give up the self. I, for one, look forward to exactly this—the giving up of my I, the dismantling of my my—with every collaboration I enter. If any of us are going to truly face and move beyond catastrophe, beyond the tyranny of total destruction, it only makes sense we get our unions right. But it requires a certain kind of rehearsal.

What you are considering takes practice: a poetry of embodiment so athletic and precise in awareness a person might be able to tell, like the difference between strands of hair on an arm, when they are being and when they are representing. I wish people, myself included, paid so much more attention to this. When are you person (unarticled, collectively unexceptional): a creature with a body that can cease, in need of a few things that can keep that body from ceasing for a time? When are you the person (a singular impression): an individuated being decidedly human because of things like power and will and the ability to tell (often ignore) time? What rights and responsibilities do we have to oscillate between these poles?

Carlos, I don’t even know. I have no idea. What I am sure of is that there is something deeply wrong with almost every single thing that purports a walkable path for our current set of global conundrums, among the most egregious of these bamboozling maps being the very art we make. I roll my eyes, the ones long weary in their sockets, watching people leave the comfort and shelter of their own homes in daily attempts to convince themselves that they are uncomfortably exiled in service of some kind of art when they are mostly dissatisfied with the entrails of catastrophe they’ve been fed, not recognizing they should be ever grateful they have not been served the belly of the beast.

I think of remnants, the leftovers we’re made to consume daily. Our stomachs are full of ghosts. It leaves little room for the Spirit.

I know giving up the self makes room for more Spirit.

Children, if they get to be that, are full of Spirit.

As I am the Magician says: “The child is easy to trick, but he is no fool.”

Fools are people who grow in years under the mistaken impression that they can keep the whole Spirit of the child. This is a tendency toward possession, a refusal to give up self.

I keep wishing people would grow up: more, faster, actually. I keep praying people would just give themselves up.

I keep wondering if the most important difference between fantasy and imagination is the personal sacrifice it takes to step out of your own mind, the fantastical realm, and into something more collectively, totally unknown: Chaos, the imaginative real.

I am not convinced people actually know what Chaos is.

The current definition of “chaos” might just be: systems of deliberate disorder manufactured by very human hands over time, fantasies on a countdown. I fear this because I recognize it in the worlds artists make: perpetuating economies of power, possession, and hierarchal transaction; inventing small and temporal countries that mimic the violence of colonization; trapping people in personal fantasies while touting enthusiastic convictions about these small and giant feats of imagination; hoping that repeated failures in any or all of these tasks might prove none of these horrors are actually true.

It’s sick.

More and more I find troubling correlations between the projects of nation building and art making. The obsession seems to be focused on the wrong query. I don’t think the question is how do we (I) make a(nother) world. What kinds of gods do we think we are? I think the challenge is how might we (all) really live in this one. After everything that’s been done, after history, into the future: What is the collective move forward? Beyond life, beyond death, beyond even love: How are you present? How do you care?

With all my love and gratitude for your care, Diane

Dear Diane,

Before anything else, a deep and abiding, THANK YOU. I find it impossible to imagine having gone through this program without you. So, I’ll dispense with that non-occurrence. A confession: Diane, I do not understand time. Sometimes it feels like Time is carrying me, at others, that I’m riding Time, like a current down whichever river I’m closest to at the time. And then sometimes, Time drops me off. It’s at these moments; I can see more clearly what’s around me. I’ve had more of those moments these past three years. That’s no small thing, and it has been a privilege to be in your company for this leg of the journey: contemplating shape, geography, land, home, exile, wakes, breaks, prophecy, utterances, and good blood.

It took me forever to learn to tie my shoes; and when I was young, it was often said of me, and quite like this: “That boy ain’t got a lick of common sense.” It wasn’t just that I was untethered; I was a bona fide space cadet. And we don’t need to debate whether I still am sometimes. It was the sky, and the night sky ,in particular, that captivated me, the stars, and the stars’ integrity; I was obsessed. In the face of that mystery, tying shoelaces, the right-in-front-of-your-faceness of it, was rendered a ridiculous prospect. I couldn’t do it. I resisted; and the result being, I tripped all over the goddamned place. That's where we find ourselves, in this world of ours. Trippin.’

I know now that it takes confrontation with death, to approach the common. Death, being that which is held by all. Common, as in that which brings us into a greater fellowship of consideration. If this is true, neither of us is lacking; and not just us. So many Others are not lacking in this confrontation with actual death, and so ultimately, find it impossible and futile to be in the habit of abstracting death. I'm attempting to think this abstraction of death with a western obsession for nostalgia, and now, a burn-it-at-all-cost kind of that nostalgia, which cannot ever be fulfilled: well, at least, the nostalgia can’t. We can burn, and this nostalgia is ultimately an exercise in fantasy. We live right now. We live right now. That eternal and childish daydreaming which fixes the gaze on a kind of time that collapses in on itself, this nostalgia pulls everything which it encounters into itself, turning all it encounters into bone, fodder, ash, global ghosts. We are not!

Prophecy, as dramaturgy, may be an intervention, or rather a way of being, before this way we’ve trod along embedded itself as normative and sufficient. At once atmospheric, and capacious, inchoate, prophecy invites us to open ourselves to all time. It is evident to me when encountering, Good Blood, and its stratagems, that what I am experiencing is a deployment of the reparative, the prophetic. It is attention inside of Time, the linear made eternal. In this way, Good Blood is epic. There is a cartography of Spirit at work; that prayerful attention that requires a lover to get up off their damn knees, and to stand up, open, and rise before the work at hand. Chelsea Beyond Her Years depends upon this opening. All of us do.

Diane, this labor of regard is a hallmark of your work and the liberatory ethic at its core. Liberation will not be managed. The ways of being, your work insists upon is different than just collisions with systems of reform, it's after revolution. This must be rehearsed in our rooms even before we build them; and how do we build the literal rooms, this one being one of those, but really all our inhabitations, so that these inhabiting spaces bring us, truly bring us into consideration of our condition. We don't have to do this alone; and of course, we can’t. If, at times we get frustrated with theater, and really all art, it’s precisely where we’ve not encountered a proper consideration, which is sometimes just really being with someone, or something, together, even an idea, or a question, a death even. What about the weather?

(Insert tornado, hurricane joke here, can I take a rain check?)

Home is the force, beyond any other that totalizes and marks us. It is our great and proper reaction. Home is wherever I am. Well, it is, and it isn't. Home is an attachment to land. So am I homeless when I am landless? Home is where my Ancestors’ Spirits are. Can Spirits swim? I mean, really, can they swim and, if so, how far; also, do they get tired? I’m really asking. In Good Blood, Chelsea Beyond Her Years senses this paradox and inquires. I can’t tell if she’s satisfied with the answer she receives. I don’t know if we are.

The 40,000 ghosts, or the incalculable deaths, as they are so often referred, in media and history, haunt Good Blood, haunt us. I’m talking about incalculable loss, here. It is it true, the calculus of it is impossible task, and at the same time, I know, that we better do our math, and by do our math, I mean calculate, and by calculate, I mean remember, and where memory and the archive fail us, we must imagine, which means that our work is never finished.

The result and inverse of nostalgia is apocalypse. It is often presented as alien and not actual, as that which is far away. I want to argue for its presence with us now. One need only pay attention. When we can’t see this, this is marker of a willful evacuation of memory.

Can we get an intervention?

Can we?

I have to believe that we are all older than we know.

Like Time, Good Blood carries us, rides us, drops us all inside of itself, like Time.

With Love,

Carlos

#letters #Good Blood #The Utterances #catastrophe #apocalypse #new plays

From the Good Blood Bank

#Good Blood #collage

X. (An Elegy in 10 Parts)

I. If I could describe the feel- ing, the im- pulse that made me check on infinity… Walking down the street in no particular time, so when my down- ward gaze fell upon a hole where the rock should have been, I suffered the loss in silence.

II. That’s a lie— I gasped. Car engines roared. And I retraced my steps: bed, kitchen, shower; slept hard, did dishes, washed hair. The stone could have fallen, could have dislodged itself from its setting at any point in recent time while I wasn’t looking, just like you fell, dislodged yourself from your living that night in March or April twenty years ago when my eyes were set on the encyclopedias.

III. Now there is a gap in my ring like there used to be a gap in my teeth and my immediate response: pay to fix it, close it, again. I am apparently the only one interested in keeping me whole. I am the only one who can afford to.

IV. I would like to ask your spirit if it really gave me a diamond to hold for the rest of my life when I was just eight. I am asking the universe if a tiny diamond just fell through my fingers in this, my third decade.

V. Mountains erode.

VI. I think for a second to mention it to him, but he cannot afford a diamond. (He wants to get rich quick.) He cannot afford to make me whole. So I offer him an air plant trapped in a jar instead— much cheaper for both of us.

VII. Infinity crumbles.

VIII. I say, “I keep bringing you flowers but flowers die. So here’s this plant that doesn’t really grow, but, also, won’t die. Dunk it in water once a month.”

IX. I believe every living thing should be baptized.

X. I believe the poem washes away.

#poetry #poem #lost things #ring

Untitled (on losing)

Marching down cool Cortelyou there might be trumpets, music, heat in the night, lit by a full other sun. We should be able to in your kitchen slurp, wipe hours on shirts like real big kids. Pray you grow up not to be my father or yours.

#losing #poem #poetry #cortelyouroad #fathers #Brooklyn

I Will Tell You What It Feels Like to Give Up a Ghost

You are hungry so you eat. And just like that: a stomach calmed. Whoever’s voice is swooning over the speakers in this restaurant across the street from the firehouse is saying things like Aaliyah. Doesn’t sound like her, just uses the same hook. And when you leave to go to the bar, you immediately regret it because it’s loud in here. People are laughing too loud in here, trying too hard to have a good time. There is a panic— the ghost might creep up. And without a second thought you cross the street quickly praying that the ghost does not visit. It’s quiet in this new restaurant: relief. You sit at the bar. Your drink overflows. All signs are good omens now or don’t mean anything at all, which is also good. Open the book without the shame of loneliness or irony and read. Read until you don’t forget that you are there at the bar nursing a tumbler of bourbon, rose water, and black pepper. This is an elixir and you don’t even know it. Last year you were yelling verses about the end of the world, punching poems into the chests of the short and broad-breasted, kidnapping people’s sons and threatening to love them more than their own mothers, love them longer, with more angles, than all the girls who broke their hearts when they were as small as they still are. But that was a whole lot of mourning and your job is done now. You packed the box, the bag, your mouth. No one wanted to listen so you talked all that shit with your friends. And now y'all just be laughing, sipping, demanding tax refunds in lieu of reparations. What is a country? What is anything? I’m not asking. In the middle of a cackle, a real one from the back of your throat, you realize this is how you do it: like your mothers, choose to live while the world ends once more. I meant it when I said I would kill it, could kill you. I am not a liar. So when she slapped him in the face and he hit her back and she smashed the bottle over his head, I laughed. I said, “I would’ve done exactly the same.” I am not a liar. Sunder— what a word. What women I’ve read who have grown too big for their loves and so their only recourse— salvation— is to become children again with the caveat of knowing the precise moment when they must break the bottle over the head and go to sleep so they can put out the fire. Oh, what women I know! I crossed the street where the building I used to sleep in a bed adjacent to my father’s still stands and did not seek out the ghost. Instead I walked straight ahead to Flatbush where I was met by a dollar van masquerading as an all black Access-a-Ride, like a stallion, like one of the Rapture’s horses without its man. A sign! A sign! Board without panic and you, too, might be greeted by Maxi Priest pleading through the speakers and a woman talking to her friend about the cut of her slacks. You sing along. You laugh when you remember ghosts can’t: sing or laugh. That’s why you turned your dead cat into a god. Yes, you created a spirit. You have mastered devotion. You know what you are owed. And boy, how clean it will taste: light, like the spoonful of basil ice cream you let melt on your tongue in silence, as quiet as any day when you were four or five or six or seven and refused to lie for your father’s love; could not feign a voice that wasn’t yours. Your love was born before that, eons older than any pre-war building. And so, of course ghosts cannot be of your concern, not when you are made of dust. None of this is your concern, not when we all turn into dust. Your mother must have thought the same when she continued to love that man as she did. He is not your husband, not your cross, no, not your ghost. You laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.

It occurs to you that you are bleeding but have no interest in death.

Moth II or Fatal Force 878 and Counting as of 10:45am, EST: Stage Directions for a Play as Short as It Takes Another Officer to Kill a Person (as Short as It Takes Another Jury to Find Itself Unwilling to Find Any Officer Guilty)

-12/1/16, After Calling in Moth (7/7/16)

(Wake up well rested. Sit in bed. The sun shines bright. It was raining hardest in the dark right before sleep. It isn’t cold. The left side of the back of the head aches for no reason. Rub it. Try to leave it alone. Think of it and feel it become sore. Let the mind wander onto something else just like the day. Somewhere there is a traffic stop. The left side of the back of the head starts to crack open. Out comes a leg. Out comes another. Somewhere a cellphone camera is turned on. Out comes a wing. Somewhere there is some broken taillight. Some small and silent thing goes unrepaired. Out comes another wing. Somewhere someone is asked to step out of the car. Somewhere else someone is standing on the street. Some people just start running. Some never take off their seatbelts. Something else is freeing itself from the skull. And the cellphone camera rolls. And the bodycam films. The notification comes in. Someone is now live. Somewhere a page refreshes itself. Somewhere else some fingers are typing. A head comes out of the head. The whole body of the thing appears brown: an insect. It shakes its wings: a moth. Time has traveled. This was supposed to be another season. Time lies. Time holds up a mirror no one peers into. Time collects dust. Dust is made up of fibers and skin cells and crumbled bodies of small insects, like moths. There is a ladybug watching the whole scene from a corner on the ceiling. The fly, fat and poor in motor function, tumbled out of the window yesterday. No one knows where it went. The spiders moved in secret and took their webs with them. They resemble time. The mind wanders back. The moth is incapable of distraction. It sits on the bed, not flying. It just sits there on top of the blanket fold. It waits. It waits in silence. Somewhere someone is screaming. Somewhere someone says, “Yoooooooooooooooooo.” Somewhere someone says, “CHILL.” Somebody yells, “Please!” Someone else remains silent. There are also wails. The moth is warm in the sun. Its body is confused by the weather. The air is not cool. There is no one to cool it. The moth does not have thumbs. They were shot off. The moth does not have wings. They were shot off. The moth still has a back. It’s riddled with bullets. The moth has a coffin. Its brother paid for it. The moth has a name. It comes up in court. The moth has no justice. There is no justice for moths. The brain wonders if animals have it in them to be fair. The legs stand as the tongue says, “He is having issues.” The heart knows this to be prophecy. The joints know it, too, like feeling rain approaching in the air. Some woman raises her brow at the foolishness it takes to run. One mourns the absence of choice. The lungs hold onto breath as the eyes watch the ticker and the soul prays that the number, like the temperature, has not risen in the time it took to wake and see.)

#Walter Scott #fatalforce

For Max

The day, finally deciding to become morning, raised its temperature and turned its sky lilac. Max watched the whole thing—the day changing into itself—through a thin curtain of heat and haze. Three fishing boats sat at the shore naked as the night before. He always took care of them, the boats, when he stole them, borrowed them and brought them out to sea, pretended they were his for a time. He always steered the boats with care; folded the nets neatly, even though he never threw them out for catches; swept the floor; went so far as to scrub the sides clean…

#Good Blood #Max #boats

poem for the super duper moon in a very black sky also thanks to Kerry James Marshall

I stuck my head out the window. There were clouds. Glad I caught it last night, when I could stand naked like I was in one of those Black on black on black paintings remembering who I was. Is it wrong to feel annoyed at those who are grieving when we’ve been mourning for years? (We know who we are. If you don’t know who you are, read a book.) Stare into a canvas where the blackest black meets black painted by a man who said: “No thanks, I’m going to do it this way.” I kill a fruit fly every seventeen minutes. The spiders have moved out on. The ladybugs now rent in their stead. They’re ruder because they’re less symbolic. They don’t want to be signs. I ask, “What are you good for?” They tell me they’ll leave come spring.

All creatures are welcome here except for most people.

And I’m fine being my mom’s husband because at least she says, “Thank you, goodnight, God bless you.” And I’m fine killing my mother because this is the last time, I swear. I’m sending money for her new bed. She’ll be able to rest and I will lay down my pen. I said I’m fine writing about things you will never know. I don’t do it for you. Get a life. (If you don’t know who you are, read a book.)

Moon so close it’s rolling down the street and yet we will never know the mercy of being crushed under its weight. No celestial bones doing us any favors. So it seems that we might as well try doing something else.

#kerry james marshall #super moon

The families of Sisters and Saints & Good Blood in Jérémie

From this point in l’histoire: The deepest red marks the oldest ones from Red Essence, Fond Rouge (b1930s), in the southwest. The lighter red marks the younger generation born and living in the United States (b1950s), Brooklyn. The coldest blue marks the oldest ones from Under the River, Anba Larivyè (b1950s), in the southwest. The purple marks the ones born from the unions of Red Essence and Under the River (b1985), with the lighter purple marking a birth in Brooklyn (b1980). The green marks the ones from Le Cap, in the north (b1986). The grey marks the one born most recently, after the earth broke (b2016).

The Butcher and the Chicken Fight Promoter begat Louise, Francine, Carol, and Max.

Louise and Jean sired twin sons.

Francine and Jean spawned three daughters, each named Marie.

Carol and Ernest brought into the world Denise and Marie-Ange.

The Candlemaker and Serge the Chef produced Ernest.

Max sat in many a garden sowing, but never growing his seed.

The Stone Engraver and the Chicken Fight Promoter created Namiba.

Namiba and Ernest brought about Solange.

Solange and Frankie generated Laline.

The restaurant owners had Frankie.

The Dress Maker and the Farmer made Josephine.

The Midwife and Sam the Chef gave rise to Yves.

Josephine and Yves gave birth to Chelsea.

#sistersandsaints #goodblood #newplays

After Matthew

I want to respond to his email with:

My mother is drowning in her grave. My grandmother’s house is finally broken. I am always already thinking both of these things. Time has caught up with my imagination’s prophecies. Or maybe it’s that the inevitable (so boring) has finally occurred.

I tell him instead that my family is mostly, probably safe in the flooding capital. This is a lie. I have no idea. In the evening I call my mom to confirm my misinformation: They are mostly safe in Prince’s port, yes, but also in the poet’s city. The road between the two is no longer a road. All those people died in Okap— no, that’s up north— Les Cayes? Anything I know about this land has nothing to do with its geography, has everything to do with its spirits, its curse, its meetings with disaster, its mother, Chaos.

Someone reminds me that I come from a country of survivors (who never get to live), people who are always rebuilding (and never get to build).

Last week mom told me that my mother visited a friend in a dream, a friend who lives in New Jersey, to let her know that she is sleeping on the ground. Didn’t bother stopping by any of her sisters’ slumbers in Brooklyn, which prompted mom to call me and chide:

“Your mother told someone else, not even me, that she is sleeping on the ground.”

I keep refusing to hand over the cash because, poetically, I want to fix the tomb myself. And now I’m wondering if she is even still resting on that hill. I’m wondering if her body has floated away, north once more, perhaps meeting up with those misplaced swimming souls in Baton Rouge, all on their ways back across the globe to convene with the ones who were left at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

#HurricaneMatthew #Hurricanes #Haiti

Edit Update

My uncle Serge is now dead. My aunt Jacqueline is now dead. My grandmother’s sister Madame Leon is now dead. My uncle Frankie died a year or two ago. My mother is still dead. My father is still dead. My aunt Enide has craters under her eyes so dark she looks like she might be dying. My mom’s marriage finally died. My attachment to the apartment I grew up in is deceased. My dreams for the life I should have had in my home city are no longer living. My love is still looking. My love is still looking for a place to land. My fantasies are dead. My dreams are dead. I killed them. I am very much alive. Some people would rather see me dead. Some people are unknowing zombies. Some people don’t know they’ve died because they are still walking. My cat has been dead for months. The grass that covers her corpse is brown. That thing that sometimes drives me is dead. That zombie waking in my chest, I fight it. I have to if I want to stay alive. That’s why my body keeps looking. My body keeps looking for fertile land. I am not dead. For some, I have too much life. “But what else am I supposed to do?” I ask. Some people are dying, some cities, countries, too. Some great uncle died and mom said, “Only the signature remains.”

To be a writer of this race is to constantly be revising—mourning—the living record.

The Table

Mary at the table sits in quiet waiting to strike with the rice she cooked for him and plated with poison.

The girl stood at the fountain. He asked her to strike a pose. What would remain was a photo just like the one on the ferry where all her eyes could do was haunt like the time at the table all because of the rice and the poison from Mary.

He sat at the table. It hit him soon enough, the poison, when his daughter posed in front of the fountain years later or when she looked into the camera on the ferry years after that.

What remained was the strike of a haunt in her eyes, a haunt that hadn’t been there before that night at the table.

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