chris

Originally published in Theory of Flight (1935) Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform, who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words, whether it is the crash of lips on lips after absence and wanting : we must close the circuits of ideas, now generate, that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose. Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky, here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame, here is the man night-walking who derives tomorrow's manifestoes from this midnight's meeting ; here we require proof in solidarity, iron on iron, [...]

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) 1 For that you never acknowledged me, I acknowledge the spring's yellow detail, the every drop of rain, the anonymous unacknowledged men and women. The shine as it glitters in our child's wild eyes, one o'clock at night. This river, this city, the years of the shadow on the delicate skin of my hand, moving in time. Disinherited, annulled, finally disacknowledged and all of my own asking. I keep that wild dimension of life and making and the spasm upon my mouth as I say this word of acknowledge to you forever. Ewig. Two [...]

An Idea ran about the world screaming with the pain of the mind until it met a child who stopped it with a word. The Idea leaned over those newborn eyes and dreamed of the nature of things: the nature of memory and the nature of love; and forgave itself and all men. Quieted in a sea of sleeping the Idea began its long return-- renewed by the child's sea-colored eyes remembered the flesh, smiled and said: I see birds, spring and the birthplace unknown by the stable stone. I know light and I know motion and I remember I [...]

"My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?" James Joyce If I could write : Summer waits your coming, the flowers are colored, but half-alive and weak, earth sickens, as I sicken, with waiting, and the clouds print on the dull moon a dark and blotting streak. If I could write : no energy is kinetic, storm breaks nor foot falls until you arrive, the trees thrive, but no fruit is born to hang heavily : and the stale wind continues to drive all pausing summer before it into the distance from which you, shining, will [...]

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) In the human cities, never again to despise the backside of the city, the ghetto, or build it again as we build the despised backsides of houses.Look at your own building. You are the city. Among our secrecies, not to despise our Jews (that is, ourselves) or our darkness, our blacks, or in our sexualitywherever it takes us and we now know we are productive too productive, too reproductive for our present invention - never to despise the homosexual who goes building another with touchwith touch(not to despise any touch) each like himself, like [...]