We are, thank you, doing just fine.
Between forkfuls of cheese S.
thrice mouths the word Assault. Twice
she invites me to anger and I do,
expanding space-time as a witness
nighttime eyeballs-in-the-bush. I tell her, That sucks!
Kicking my own sins quiet under the table.
I am maybe overeager, to take up responsible arms.
To perceive is to suffer. To conceive-
Of her filial mood as playing princess
on the veranda, cantilevered property,
waving, cold, lonely. Our waiter sweltering under two masks,
us eating out on some narcissist sputter of puissance,
adulting like lubed artifacts shine the anal end of innocence.
But I am here. Alcoholics well-labelled. So is S.
Bellwether multitude. Our flocks giggle us. We're ditzy like
the toddlers, how they laugh at pooping in the toilet,
Here it comes, here it comes, there it goes, there it goes...
Have you noticed every story is about going home? Let's go home.
Home hours later O. and I calling on our Latino neighbors
because our landlord just died, which makes for convenient evictions.
V. answers the door with her giant baby and invites us in, wet boots and all.
V: we don't speak much English. Me: hablo un poco Español...
then three miles of time crawls by while I'm mutely remembering how to talk and V. has already called her husband J. to mediate between us women, which is practical but shames me, and what does she feel?
I say Eviction, tripping over it, like I was trying to say it and not say it at the same time,
it could happen, but it might yet not.
V. is justifiably stressed and hunted and attends to the house and the escaping baby to envelop them in place
while traveling through time, our bilingual conversation.
The walls are dirty. The plumbing is broken.
The landlord is a bastard. The landlord is a bitch.
The landlord is an ingrate, he stole money from me.
The landlord is a miser, he upcharged our electricity. May he rest in peace.
Will you come to our Tenants' meeting on Tuesday?
I understand my own Whiteness best as it relates to power
and who wields it, and this is my neighbor's house. It’s a house at risk of losing its people.
That sucks. Again, again everybody: Tenants' Meeting on Tuesday.
The more tenants we can get together in one room, the more power we have, the less chance of anyone being evicted.
It's a seed-debris game. The sowing of seeds explosively expands space-time. Expanding, cooling, slowing: My home currently precariously Had: let's go to that Had home now and think privacy thoughts.
A bed, a bed, a bath, a book. A bundle of January herbs dry and bitter on a hook.
The perverse desire to matter balanced with the cooperative need to act, and act correctly. Balanced and empty for now, though I could talk or make love forever.
I take my literature and grow it, at the speed of bloody conception, home.
cdzhouse 