CONTENT NOTE
‘Eboshi’s Sick’ makes mention of gun violence and war.
Eboshi’s Sick
Prodigal hearth
the old the elder
bayog encasement metals encasement
expectoration evidencing ailment against bandage
upon bandage
offering oracular the restful antedated sick.
Salt ode abrasions sulphur and carbonous abrasions
careful the choreography of hands
making bargain with blacksmithing
kiss of round barrel
and the game of sweet targetry
the sanguinary investment
the begging of slow questions
What makes the accursed sick?
What wounding emerges from woundedness
to render illness
the militant means
the packaged bruisings
sequestered absolutions and exculpated ends
To each a gunmanship eir weaponry.
To each eir weaponry a dissolute ownership.
to each gun emptied
into phosphorous night
a floundering arms- and- legs dissolution
spirit and brokenbone dissolution
war a machinery of making sick the sick
the sick heavy palpitation of dolorous practice
the clockwork mechanism the minute adjustments
the inching towards
the woundful whispers fatal fracturing
the familiar aches
and the killing of old gods dispersing the shrapnel
Yakul
“What is a nation? Show me one. I don’t want to be killed by an abstraction.”
—Nagisa Oshima, ‘Death by Hanging’ (1968)
Stranger deer
twin ringlets magnificent and
Originary, the roots that birthed me.
Where have you come from?
Who do you belong to?
Witness to
analgesic elsewheres
the steady drumbeat I belong to
trading ancient
consanguine grasses
There is a loneliness for the ones
dreams the dawning
There is a naming
of a language in remembrance
In setting out
my colour, brilliant
this bond
so I must be forgotten, home
singular kin of an only species
to revive recollection
loved
and leaving
grand antlers as branches
untethered from tethering.
A heart’s territory my vernacular answer.
A memory of ancestor.
Time in memoriam.
possessive declaration
rendering loneliness lonelier
time in its corridors
folklores of wellsprings
my untrodden, inexhaustible pastures.
whose cardinal direction
of a hearthland.
for the loneliness
of sibling spirit.
my forgettings were not multiple
my back, willing
ageless
a place begging to be forgotten
haven’t I tasted my companion waterways
of a loved country
but left
left longing
and longing
and longing
on holding a heart open
And though from the outset I knew it would cause pain to me
I’d never played an instrument with limbs wrapped around limbs
just so
with feet on the ground and ears open to the egress
of sound from symmetry, as if music was a practice of making love
with what failed to containerise it.
And the small
marsupial noises made when called girlfriend.
Not my girlfriend.
Just a girlfriend, as if love wasn’t in competition with the singularity
of my heart’s ownership, but loosened its wings to the call of a kinship
everywhere, many, like a map unfurled over the fastnesses of flight paths
I had not known except by the contours of their desire to trace statelessness.
And the awkward gestures of having asked to touch, slowly,
and then the touch, less slow, dissolving the questions in those first gestures,
transmuting into another language that respected less what nervousness
held up to
and the nervousness
protection the panic
the shared loves that suspended a life briefly until aloneness was animated
with the hum of what was made in concert the timbre of skin against skin
which craved a closeness against the evidence of hips pressed together
closer than reason found sustainable
I held them for a moment and they were not for me to hold.
So many things pass through possession this way.
To tell them I loved them and to have meant that, against history,
I surrendered to the threat of having been made intelligible. And afterwards
to have surpassed their every horizon until the after-love meant to endure
a world-ending that was survivable.
I left their life the way I entered it.
Love, I kept your life in the way I wanted my life to be kept.
Like the convergence of lone reefs in an era beyond ancient imagination
that remembrance of crossed rhythms chest against chest
each drumhead modulation decanting into forgotten frequencies
until barely audible
this, not my heart anymore
just a heart now
once briefly, brilliantly mine.