CAROLYN SAMS

Come my cantilations,
Let us dump our hatreds into one bunch and be done with them,
Hot sun, clear water, fresh wind,
Let me be free of pavements,
Let me be free of the printers.
Let come beautiful people
Wearing raw silk of good colour,
Let come the graceful speakers,
Let come the ready of wit,
Let come the gay of manner, the insolent and the exulting.
We speak of burnished lakes,
And of dry air, as clear as metal.

Jeremy Scott, I wish I coulda been there.

Stream it because it’s good.

The history of revolutions is the history of vague ideas,
Shrugging shoulders, not shrugging shoulders,
Standing around, acting without thinking,
Acting with thinking, being penned or penning,

Being a woman or a girl standing around,
A woman or a girl with some flour in her pocket
    for tossing up a cloud of flour
           to obscure the martial men’s sight.

That white cloud of whatever
Among the moving and unmoving bodies
Is that history-like unhistory
        of the ahistorical average,
That lovely inexact and provisional something—

weaponized or never.

How totally under-theorized is breathing,
Walking and not walking,
Wanting to have a good time or just having it,
Like everybody is gunning toward Eden
      and nobody is in school with their bodies anymore.

The history of revolutions is a history of the orthodox
     weeping over their faltering
                      orthodoxies:

Any precise thing—dumb these days:
The very idea imprinting nothing
        on the air between the general buildings.

No human space—a printer’s paper.
Nothing exact—impressed.

Sometimes I try to make poetry but mostly
    I try to earn a living. There’s something still living
 in every urn, I am sure of it. The ash moves
       around inside the vase like the magnetic filings that make
the moustache of Wooly Willy. Maybe a new face counts
      as reincarnation. The wand says, “I’ll be your ostrich,
 if you’ll be my swan.” In this life, what did I do wrong?
I think my heart is a magnet too. It attracts anything
 that attracts joy like the summer grasses the swans track through.
       OMG, how in love I am with joy and with yours—how I know
that adding to it would only take it further off course,
      off its precarious center, so for once, I won’t touch it.
 I will stand wand-length away—let it
    glide stupidly on its weightless line, without me.

At Family on Fairfax (Taken with instagram)

thingsorganizedneatly:

Martin Creed

The first time I saw my mother, she’d been dead
fourteen years and came as a ghost in the mirror,

plucking the hair beneath her arms, and humming
a bossa nova. She lotioned her chapped heels

and padded her bra as if she were alive in the old way.
She said I was born with my cord wrapped

around my neck like a rosary, and she knew God,
the doomed father of her days, wanted us both.

Before midnight she plaited my hair, hemmed my skirt,
sang lullabies she’d learned on the other side of the flood.

She lifted her dress to show her bones shedding light
on stillborn fetus accidentally raptured into her ribs.

She said she’d choose her death again, obey any pain
heaven gave her. Years ago she watched a man ride

a diving bell to the bottom of the Amazon to face
the mysteries God had placed there. The chain broke,

and they pulled him to the surface smiling, stiff, refusing
to open his fists. They broke and unpeeled his fingers.

No one wept or fought to hold it. She covered her eyes
so she wouldn’t see what God, in his innocence, had done.

Save food from your fridge.