61.
You & I on the couch this morning
You in your work clothes & I in my bathrobe
Both of us cloaked in silence
when is a good day to die?
Not Monday because she’s fair
Thursday maybe
because Thursday’s child they say has far to go
A list of words to go through:
Laundry
Banking
Baking
Insouciance
Slithery
Computational
Universality
Dispersal
Do words feel the tongue of the speaker?
In the middle of a sentence, a dream
After fucking like dogs pounding ourselves into each other
Intent on each of us becoming one other
When is a good day to die?
At the junction where Broadway meets Main
A heart falls out on to the road
& the bus brakes just in time
Look after your heart, mister!
What are you doing?
Didn’t your mother teach you
to take care of your heart?
May or August, perhaps
Any month but your birthday month
That would be altogether too cruel
62.
This week we swore we’d dismember language
We pinky-promised to make a list
We’d take first English apart word by inept word
We’d begin with articles
From Monday on, we’d dismiss the specific
the general, the commander & the war
& just like that:
there was no more war & no language for it
On Tuesday you suggested
that we bleed out the possessives
Nothing could belong to anyone or anything
Share one, share alike
& I was no longer your darling
So we buried Conrad in the backyard
Along with all five European languages he used to speak
We buried Marlowe beside him, greedy fucker that he was
along with all the declarations he made
By Friday we could still articulate love so we hanged on
to action words as political cowardice
Saturday, there was no more point
we opened blue caches of verbs
No subject
No verb
No object
No simple sentences to point towards complex existences
No subjects
No other
No thing
So we hummed ourselves to sleep
63.
Beloved, yesterday I sent my gal to the market
& she hasn’t come back
Beloved, I sent my daughter to the market
the loud one
the big one
the noisy one
the boisterous one
I sent my best self to the market
& now she won’t come back
She was to pick up fresh vegetable, fruit
some other grocery — soap & the like
How long was she there?
Not very long, I expected her back any minute
Yesterday’s market isn’t there any more
That big, loud, boisterous space
where storied & money & goods changed hands is gone
All the souls fled except for the ones that hang around
Dancing in the breeze
& whistling through plastic bags that flap about
All the scattered things & bodies & embers
All the bits that used to represent life
All the stories that were interrupted mid sentence
when my daughter, strapped by some strangers
blew up into nothing
Yesterday I sent my life to the market
It’s as if I never existed before
Beloved, where did we take the wrong turn?
64.
Today you bury your son
breath in & breath out
How is it even possible?
Yesterday I sent my daughter to the market
& today you bury your son
Breath in & breath out
never stopping, never stopping
even in the middle of wracked grief
where did we take the wrong turn, beloved?
Where?
65.
Adjectives, nouns & adverbs
in a bowl
like fruit
from last week
starting to go bad
starting to have the sick sweet smell
of fruit going bad
starting to die
starting to know that fruit knows
that they’re dead
the moment that they’re picked from the tree
A collection of wilting words
waiting to be thrown out
into the compost
Juliane Okot Bitek 