The Mundane, Sublime and Fantastical: 165 New Poems (11-15)

These are the sorts of things we must never speak about:

-the way you make me feel

So what is it we can speak of if we can’t even write about it?

12.

It was you all along

Standing at the shore — willing me, willing me

I getting ready to cross the street at Broadway and MacDonald

& I dissolve into a puddle of water reflecting the amber light

Stop

Traffic above me, traffic all around

Horns everywhere and nowhere at all

You said you were thinking of me at the edge of the world

How long did you hold on to the water in your palm?

13.

O, to be a single sheet of paper beneath your writing hand

A pen in this digital age

A pen hovers over me

Write

Mark me

Write all, all over me

14.

The romance has settled and the curator of travellers have classified us:

Traders, explorers, discoverers, exiles, migrants, invaders, musicians

colonizers, lovers, takers, thinkers, investors, artists, mongrel,

slavers, hoarders of disease, artists, mongrels, green eyed slaves,

sailors, translator, immigrants, refugees, missionaries, adventurers,

thinkers

We stopped returning when home disappeared in a foggy past

Bury me here

I can no longer hear the music from my home

15.

Tell me a story, the woman said, so I can make sense of my new self

Mold these bits into a woman

I can’t do that, the man said

You are already all woman

Here, lie down, sleep

Here, eat

Here let me bathe you

Here let me do your hair

Here, let me love you back

Now the room is full of soft creatures

— not speaking but humming like the fridge

Ribbons, silk and lace in pastel

that’s what will distract him now

Why is this betrayal that he won’t look at you?

Why is this betrayal that your place at his feet is no longer enough?

Why must you grovel ?

What does it mean to not be seen?

What does it mean to know that you are not seen?

What does it mean to be invisible?

The Mundane, Sublime and Fantastical: 165 New Poems (6-10)

10.

Sons Also Daughters

For Tamara Symanska-Golik

Sons Also Daughters

Rummage through your life

Picking this, picking that

Killers all,

Sorting through your bones

Taking this, taking that

Also daughters

Picking at strands of hair

Gawking at roomfuls of combs, ribbons, brushes

Also daughters

Picking what seeds to save

Which to discard

What instances to remember

Which to forget

Sons also daughters

Killers all

Spreading seeds, writing code

One zero one zero

One for life

Zero for nought

One for air

Zero for everything else

Sons also daughters

Bear life

Hold the proof of your existence

In the stories they pick from your things

Your hair brush, your bones

Your fingernail clippings, you clothes, sheets

Shoes, you papers, love letters

Your old spices, the whole kitchen

Your memories of that place

Your loves, regrets, dead dreams

Also sons

Also daughters

Also sons

Also daughters

Enough

Enough with the uneasiness

The not belonging

The where are you from really where are you originally from

Enough with the how long have you been here have you been back when are you going back do you visit often aren’t you lucky to come from a place so warm do you like it here

Enough with the statistics that show that migrants come to this country with a higher level of education than the natural-born citizens and on average their children tend to do better than their parents maybe because they are born citizens but not natural-born citizens and why is there such a lack of nurses and doctors but we can’t trust the level of training they bring so they must mop the hospital floors and drive the gurneys to the morgue and drive taxis with their strong accents because they are used to driving in impossible traffic over there and at least they have a job in these days these terrible days these days of world-wide recession also called an economic down turn

My economic down turn happened way back when we left with some clothes, one photo album no books and plenty of hope because there was a shortage of nurses and they spoke English where we were going and it was not going to be so cold in the winter after all

My economic down turn happened when my job searches were limited to those that required high-school certificates and on the job training otherwise the directions to the human resources office led to the exit at the back of the building where a dark-skinned security guard held a cigarette between a yellowed thumb and index finger and had no smile for me

I want to go home

I’ve got the high-school certificate and years of misdirection, decades of living in paradise aren’t we lucky to live in paradise aren’t we lucky to have the mountains and the beaches and all this aboriginal art to look at to look at to look at don’t touch

I’ve done my stint at washing dishes for twelve-hour shifts working at the golden arches where customers demand white vanilla ice-cream no chocolate on it because I could never have understood that white vanilla ice cream was no swirl and what didn’t we have ice cream where I come from

We all want to go and live in paradise after all this after all this

After all we are not the inheritors of the riches in our backyard because we don’t have any trained geo-physicists to survey the land or ethics panels to tell us

That it is

Not right

not right

not right to

take

And leave us the pollution to deal with the high unemployment the shine gone from our dark skins the white smiles the ring-wormed children the long train of cervical cancer that they say is on its way to Africa

Now all I need is a passport and a country to call home

Smoke

I’ll never smoke again

Smoke

I’ll never drink again

Smoke

I’ll only drink for health and only red wine at that

Smoke

I already drank another one and hid away the can

Smoke

I lie

Smoke

I evade

Smoke

It’s all make up anyway

Smoke

We all die some day

Smoke

It’s not really a struggle, it’s a game, I can handle it

Smoke

You don’t matter

Smoke

What a fucking disaster

Smoke

I can’t wait to start again

Our lands like our bodies like our minds like our mines

for excavation

what’s your blood type?

will you be donating your organs?

If so, tick this box

If not tick this other box

Sign here and here and here and here and here

And so it was that we slid into things at the beginning of spider season

Spiders across the kitchen floor

Scuttling over the memory of us just there

Spiders along the wall exactly where your palms were

One spider hanged delicately, deliciously

hovered and then climbed up and disappeared into nowhere

Perhaps you were never here after all

The Mundane, Sublime and Fantastical: 165 New Poems (1-5)

The Microphone is not a Gun

The fact that a man picks up a microphone – that’s it, you see? That’s what makes him a rapper. It’s not a gun, it’s only a microphone.

Eminem. Interview with Zadie Smith. “The Zen of Eminem,” for Vibe Magazine.

I agree.

It’s not appropriate to think that the microphone could be a gun – it’s not. It’s only a microphone.

Not like the blues weeping, dripping all sassy like, sexy like, painful like, relieved like, sad again, like no word ever spoken – it’s nothing. It’s only a microphone.

And microphones are dead.

No.

Microphones are not dead.

Microphones are dead.

No.

Microphones are not dead.

No.

A microphone will switch on a voice whose cross-hairs marks everyone in the room; more, everyone within earshot.

A microphone will illuminate the dogs, the cockroaches, the foreigners, illegal aliens, refugees, the bastards arriving here by ship, here to take our women, our men, talk our children out into the streets, into hazy drug addicted lives; here to convince us that it never happened, it never did, nobody touched their them, nobody, nobody sodomized our kids, not even in God’s name.

The microphone is not dead.

It’s dead.

It’s not dead.

(The microphone is dead without a voice)

The microphone is all your life reduced to nothing

You’re dead when the message comes through to say that you are, or soon will be anyway. The voice behind the microphone says — kill the bastards! Gas them! Hack them! Shoot them! Get rid of every single one of them.

It’s not a gun, Eminem says. It’s not a gun.

The microphone for sure is not the poet who proclaims the death orders.

It’s certainly not a pile of tusks in Mombasa waiting to catch a fire and scream nothing.

Don’t you know that elephant tusks have no voices?

Microphones are not flowers, not love songs, not God on the podium, not Christ, or Mohammed, wailing in the desert

God is love! God is love! God is Love!

There is only one God

And God is love in the priest’s hands, in the killer’s trigger finger, your mother’s hands, mine – all God’s love – tell us!

Tell us, God’s man, tell us!

This microphone is not a gun. It’s a microphone. It’s not God carrying on, spewing love from the mountain-top.

It’s only a microphone.

It’s not a gun aiming to shatter your innards, desecrate that temple of love that you carry about, as your thoughts disintegrate into dust motes that float only in the light.

But have no doubt. The microphone is not a gun, but it can and will kill you.

The one that will save you only needs to whisper the truth that you already carry in your veins —

You’re alright as you are.

You’re lovely as you come.

You’re beautiful even as you look away, even as you sigh, holding you head in your hands, thinking that you can’t take much more than this.

You’re here

You exist

I see you

You belong with me, with us.

I love you

I need no gun, no microphone for that.

Blue Grey for Jodie Martinson

We, who are peddlers of stories, only focus on the blue grey

It’s the blue grey you insist on, isn’t it?

Once there was a woman who lived and died, as we all do

But she had a story

We, peddlers of stories, trade in the dark

Un-mucking details

Clearing shadows

Sweeping the dusty edges of stories that might have been fun, or even funny

Once there was a woman with a story

And now there isn’t

It’s the blue grey in the shadows beneath the boats

At the marina on False Creek

Nobody looks there and nobody cares

Small waves, small waves

We peddle stories, what more is there?

Once there was a woman

What happened to her made us take second glance

Once, a woman with a story mattered because she had a story

We peddle these things as if they were nothing

One story, the next and the one after that

We get fixed

We get our fix

We fix

Once, there was a woman who lived and now doesn’t

She mattered because she had a story that piqued our interest

Once, there was a woman, six times, sixty six or six hundred

But none had a narrative like hers

Once, there was a woman whose narrative claimed her

Molded her, like clay, into someone

Someone who mattered when her story engulfed the headlines

Her details were important

Having been dusted off from the corners and shadows where no one looks

It’s your insistence on the blue grey, isn’t it?

Grey December skies, whitish, sometimes black, belie soft waves under the boats

At False Creek, where red-roofed houses upon houses overlook the water

Witnesses at everyone turn but none are interested

Except you and I, peddlers of stories

Who get our fix, fix and are fixed

I wish it were night

Because what I need to tell you needs night

It needs drawn curtains, Bob melody, warm blankets, sleeping children dreaming, sucking at their mouths and your dark skin

What I need to tell you

Needs night

Your hands cupping my shoulder, the heat in your eyes

This night

Tonight

This night I need to talk to you

This night needs me, needs you, needs black

No streetlights – black

No moon – black

No black thoughts of black people here there every place

That black is black is black is black is me is you

What I need to say needs you black night

black skirt on stained carpet

black stockings

black boots, bra, bangles in a gold heap jangling the day away now quiet

What I need to say needs night with thunder that tremors

rain in sheets

lightening that brightens the sky for a second — a truth that you are more than the sum of all the parts that make me feel good

:you are black soul

What I need to say needs no TV

no shadowing bombs in Beirut

boasting suicides bombs

bragging shots

competitions of displaced people inside outside

borders citizen refugees unwanted migrants vagrants

on the west side of a blue green planet with echoes of canned laughter

No fingers to my lips, love.

What I need to tell you

2014-08-04 16.58.39

I’m holding your foot in my hand

Your right foot or left

Socked, and you’re not even Jesus

But

God, I need saving

I peel off your sock

or I put it back on

(I can’t remember now)

Your foot, socked in my hand

& you’re still not Jesus

I need saving

I need saving, my lord

My lord, I need saving

Your foot in my lap

I cradle it close

Slow enough to diffuse into my mind

In this moment

I am safe

How was it that in my mind I was walking through the field

Gathering armfuls of flowers

While you lay dying?

How is it that flowers don’t exist

that the most beautiful spot on the beach

is where you stood, hands in pocket, glum and scowling?

Race and stop, not much matters anyway

Stones and sand are evolutionary relatives

You and I are stars

Orion has become a coward, hiding behind the sun

And none of this happened

None of it happened.

Juliane Okot Bitek

poet | writer | scholar

Monthly Archives: August 2014

The Mundane, Sublime and Fantastical: 165 New Poems (11-15)

The Mundane, Sublime and Fantastical: 165 New Poems (6-10)

The Mundane, Sublime and Fantastical: 165 New Poems (1-5)