On Poetry, #10: All of a sudden the city on fire
1. The reasonable turning of the world into flame
It is entirely reasonable that when a cop murders a person an entire city should turn into flame. Cops break backs; men beat women to death so often it is barely news; drones, exist, also, and prisons, and the hard, anti-spectacular deaths of the workers and the poisoned and the poor. It is entirely reasonable that when the world as it is murders one of us that entire world should turn into flame
2. AGAINST THE POLICE
by Miguel James, trans. by Guillermo Parra
My entire Oeuvre is against the police
If I write a Love poem it’s against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police
I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police.
It is illogical to preserve a social order when that social order is a false dilemma of death. Does the necro-social order work for you? Are you a future mourner or a future murderer or a future corpse? Are the people you love safe in the world: the women, the queer people, the sick people, the poor people, the black and brown people, the workers? But aren’t all those people we love the people we all are, mostly, aren’t all those people the people who are the world, mostly, who make almost everything good in the world, too?
Who are these others that are these almost no ones who think they own everything? I sometimes try to figure them out. I’ve seen what they put in their museums: boring squares and cold marbles of perseus holding the head of medusa and video screens of young white male faces reciting the poetry of harry potter subjectivity on unceasing loop like its own patriarchal white supremacist psy-ops and so many images of women stripped of their clothes. In their books, too, and philosophies, we either never find ourselves in their indexes or worse, have to read what happens when we do. For them, moving a description of a dead child’s penis to the end of an autopsy report is a poem.
These almost no one’s of the world, narrow and conniving, convince us that the world the almost all of us make is theirs, that we can’t move through it, that we can’t eat its fruits, that we must beg for scraps or have sex for them or fight for them (scraps of what we ourselves have made). And when they can’t convince us in the quieter ways, the ways of fear and depression and desperation and attendant ideologies, then they also try to convince us with fists and badges and LRADS and newschannels and guns.
There are those who make the vast world’s vast music and there are those who shoot the narrow world’s teargas, flash grenades, water cannons, rubber bullets, regular guns.
4. What they will say is yours
Is your body, are your hours, areyour efforts, your own? Or does the narrow world say that the only thing left for you is your pain? It is easy to feel like your time belongs to your employers and your body to men or the family or the state but that your pain is yours entirely, that your struggle is a field you cultivate yourself, a thorny one of your-own-damn-fault. This is their other weapon: to make the opposite of what is true seem true. But what is actually true is that in the world as it is now pain is the one thing we can be certain we are never in alone.
The narrow world would have women and other people make people and care for them just to donate them as brutal, sensate, pained material of the world in this arrangement. It would ask us to gestate food for its nightmare. It would ask us to reproduce, with our love, fodder with a pain scale, then surplus, fodder, too, and only what can feel the pain exacted upon it. But when we feed & grow & tend each other it is not to feed & grow & tend the machinery of expansionist death. There are reasonable things we can do to refuse this. That is another kind of poem.
