FARID MATUK
from DON’T CALL IT REGINALD DENNY
Those of us who are happiest driving alone to Target
Hardly glance at the night even near the glass
Of all those double doors streaming fluorescence it is free of allegory
I want to talk to you about happiness to stay inside it
I know the injunction
to show and share my gorgeous Greek salad
So the only resistances are to change the frame
Or stand naked in the buzz of failure
And tell it plain until the plainness leaves me loosed
At the outleaping of recursion so I know
I’m just here in a body
Like boys are sometimes falling into the gravel
Outside our window under the helicopter’s searchlight
The gravel bites through to the knees, the searchlight is a thing
No trees in the parking lot of the Target leaves no cicadas
No cicadas leaves in the quiet the Christ thing
Or a little author function to turn into, smug
Delicious melting
Into a preceding story goes a gap
And my regard
The night is one more thing to pick up, I know
How sacrifice works by substitution
But what if time doesn’t pass
And it’s always there behind the feelings
It is 1863
Stripped by the searchlight
I’m strapped onto our enemy’s horse riding against a splendid
Spinning panorama tableau
It is 2014
A private management firm runs Detroit
I just have to run in to pick up a few things
The wisdom of the body and articulations
Of capital through time mean some things
But not others
The greatest good in feeling, say
Or a surging arrangement
The edge tolerance of a car
Falling down the hill’s paved turns
Matched precisely to its instrumentation
That’s how it starts
In the mouths and busy
Tuning wits
Of coworkers air animates
The histories where never
Have numbers gathered in common
Duress without making art
Like space wedged out at the words
Particulates powdered
And sent knocking in this air, it’s okay
Expensive hairstyles ride on it too
Right over freedom that’s been wrung out to withstand
The cant of advocates, expositors
The kind that sometimes loosens my jaw shitting
To a news video on my phone nature compels cleanliness
Imitating the dusty scrub of this valley when
Afternoon accepts the school bus yellow gilding routine
Of our good street’s
Parcels of critical difference
Or when I hear a professional’s song to catch the eye
I could ask you to let me be the professional
Working a little snot dry and fine
Tensile for new figuring like
You’re the god who knows
Mercury shifts shape, not category
Ofal, organic, decorative
Maybe those are stages of consequence
Tended, the pencil mustache
Invites the strangeness of the white face
Which blended with certain American things
Like shitting without a video is boring
The anus gives, slack jaws
Invite a fly pursued
In fable by greater appetites until death
Is a field in the ingesting body
Even the fingers on the outside greedy to carry
Oils pressed from garlic cloves
So curiously disquieting what was said
About the strangeness of the coloured races
Which blended with certain American things
Williams & Walker’s Dahomey stage show
Dance, copper, and face
Confessing the dear already known about a sway
But where were you born before that
Free radicals, the Tiqqun Collective for one
At a click past Imperium turn back
To describe Imperium’s outlines but never
Their own posed facial stunts
A thing being a position
And its grimacing
That makes the darkness a momentary solution
For what heat night accepts from what asphalt
Poured and settled around Target’s big box
I mean do those happiest in choosing
Being seen
As available to being seen
First force that condition
As someone else’s put off return to a homeland
As Dahomey stands in as the sass
Of nature’s whiteface comedians is here
As ornament is here saying, “Ultimately,
It’s the omnipresence of the new police
That has made the war undetectable”
Which is a laughter that is a type
In a set of my laughters
Each coded to an aspect
And color and charm in the pocket
This one is white across two or three shades
We are learning
Like Katakahli theatre faces are just out there
So rigorously trained
And still not being as good as this
Not so white as we are painted
To enter a next morning into a desert’s turns
Toward the sun in its waxes
On leaves and in its spines
Stammering, stuttering
“foregrounding asignification
mimicking, and parodying rather
Than simply opposing”
You see what it is
But where were you born before that
Forgive me for being so stupid
With this booger mustache so dark
Having carried a little blood at the start
I guess if you’re taken for a man, the old way
Was to say whatever men say
Louder so even dead you’re seen
In the distance you mark and redeem
Anything and whatever
Once looked impossible to countenance – a corner
Given to a young vendor’s t-shirts at Florence and Crenshaw
Come to read AIDS IS RUTHLESS.
SO TAKE IT EAZY.
RIP 3/26/95.
I can’t say anything after that
But just for a moment
Behind the feeling
I’m asking will we have made it – a corner
And its wits, ready
To trade attentions, not each other’s
But what’s being tended to
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NOTES
I lift the claim “Ultimately, it’s the omnipresence of the new police that has made the war undetectable…” from the Tiqqun Collective’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (Semiotext(e)).
I lift “foregrounding asignification, mimicking, and parodying rather than simply opposing,” from Daphne A. Brooks’ Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Duke University Press).
Rapper Eazy-E, née Eric Lynn Wright, died of complications from AIDS on March 26, 1995. He founded Ruthless Records and was a key member of the hip-hop group N.W.A.
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FARID MATUK
Farid Matuk is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions) and of several chapbooks including My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta). His second full-length collection, The Real Horse, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press. Matuk serves on the poetry editorial team at FENCE, on the board of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race + Writing + Art, and he teaches on the MFA faculty at the University of Arizona.
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A Dozen Nothing 