Missing Moments

what renders missing moments worth it? why
do we let them go, fleeting scintillations set off…
what goes with them? what do they fleet away?

work. and Don’t Play. and more importantly:
Don’t Fuck (not any time except what is allotted
after dark; mechanically upon exhaustion).

still stricter dictum reads: Do Not Enjoy
not joy, desire—yes! salivate, buy
be entertained (just not in joy).

yet more importantly: never love more
than yourself, you job, autonomy, your
privilege is yours alone because

You Earned it! work and work and gain,
accumulate, accrue, get rich—entrepreneur!
Compete, deceive, whatever works
whatever brings your individual its own success

will sanction this morality. Whoever dares
to disobey these dictums will be cast:
a Marxist, Feminist, a Queer—cast out

on the ship of fools—raped, robbed
confined and silenced—Blackened,
burned and what’s at stake

but life, self-preservation, moral law
insidious and cunning signs on all
the doors of offices including those

we elevate as substitutes for all
of which we’re robbed: the moments,
missing moments.

This was my favorite!:
LaDelle McWhorter (University of Richmond)
Queering Hitler: The Repudiation of Racism in Post-War America

2. revolutionary suicide

on the unspeakable ships—those
floating mass graves—do I have
the right to speak? of them? who
will give me license or sustenance?

a jew? on the unspeakable trains—those
thundering transports to mass graves coming
from showerheads hissing like promises…

the stamp in my passport (mine!): nationality:
jewish. a license to grieve? was it born with me,
or like the stamp in my passport, did I acquire it
by growing wonder? I open my heart and it leaps

out. to get back to the ships and the ghosts,
“we evolved from ghosts.” there was a woman. a man,
a child, tossed overboard. those whose names have been
drowned, leaped, souls into the water—an act of courage—

sharks traveled guarding the sides of the ships, knowing
the feeding would come regularly as the dead, the sick,
and the old were discarded at noon when they came

on deck for one hour a day and were sprayed with
hoses to wash off fiecies, piss, vomit in which they
lived, twenty-three hours a day

for three months to America!

selections happened twice a day as they lined up
before and after work and the officers separated
the sick and the old

from the rest and led them, too tired to do anything
but follow, to showering gas. quietly, sometimes, they took
off their clothes….

--instead of escape. can you imagine—a suicide
as an act of courage, and not an escape?

when Sethe chopped Beloved’s head off, that
two year old neck, instead of letting her baby’s
legs be counted, incapable of allowing her daughter
to become a slave, killing the innocence of herself

what name are we prepared to give her act?
can you imagine infanticide, as an act
of resistance, and not murder?

or, is it suicide, the final act of blame?

letter: moribund parricide
(a dying, forceless act of killing the father or something close to it)

it is hard to talk about self-referrentiality without being cute. it is hard to talk without being cute. it is hard to talk. but being cute is not such a bad thing after all? or is it? the permanent mark of priviledge. ha, ha. no. but a lasting one. priviledge is nothing but a mark. what is something but a mark? i am, you say. and, pray, explain to me who “you” is, are, may be? no, hon, not you. but i. should tell you if i could, perhaps, that i am no one. not one. not anymore. nor two nor three. i am not, without hope, after all, without fantasy i am not much. only a trace in a glass of cherry the guest left, leaves. always
with love
Irreme Seshat

In the absence of genius

so what of it that i still struggle? i will go on
struggling. struggling living. “life is that
which is capable
of error.”
I like this presence
and that absence.
I fulminate in words foam mouth
blankness
pervades the crevices where life moves like
a warm worm a theme in the glass. Oxymoronic Gibbrish.
he called my first, my last attempts.
and i believe it. so what
that i go on and question, my right to speak. my right.

but am i right to speak?

so what if something’s lacking, missing, i am
that someone i know well whose presence, absence
hangs dead in the water,
i'm afraid that if i keep this place i will become it.
stuck in place. keep on screaming: wake up!
and nothing moves. perhaps fear is
we’re stuck. all here. in place
of living, thinking, loving, moving… dance
and know my breath is not a state.