Two Nights on 16th Street
keyon gaskin performing this is an artwork… at The Lab on March 15. Photo: Alexander Girard.
We asked Tongo Eisen-Martin to respond to Simone Bailey’s Sway, Clench, Release (Requiem No. 415), performed February 24 as part of The Lab’s 16th and Mission Project in the BART Plaza, and keyon gaskin’s this is an artwork…, performed March 15–16 at The Lab as part of the CounterPulse Festival. —Eds.
First, I must apologize to the souls of the house
Wearing the cheek bones of the mask only
Pill bottle, my name is yours
Teeth of the mask now
Back of the head of the mask now
New phase of anti-anthropomorphism fending for real faces
Pretending to be a drug addict by day and reading all night
While economists return to rumors of oxygen
Stuck with one of those cultures that believes I chose this family
I am not creative
Just the silliest of the revolutionaries
Conversing with the psychic middleman
Or
Wannabe mayor
About hating your enemies
A little more realistically
Our eyesight returning to red
Notepad swimming to red
Bracing for the medicine’s recoil
I need my left hand back
I broke my neck on the piano keys
Found paradise in a fistfight
Watching the universe’s last metronome
Some have the nerve
To call a homeless teenager
Just wait
These religions will start resigning
In a decade or two
Some colorfully
Some transactionally
Children watching and identifying with people
In a cotton gothic society
Class betrayal
Gone glassless
I mean ironically
My window started fogging over too
Common phrases for gate numbers
Poor peoples’ hands
for chewable sanctity
Toned down debris
And a movable me
Fifty-two presidents for the sake of this card trick
I remember childhood
Remember the word “Childhood” being a beginning
The important thing to understanding the political economy of an empire is
How a lie is experienced
A poet loses his mind, you know, like the room has weather
Or first-girlfriend gravity
Poem gravity
Mind-game gravity
Or revolution languishing behind
The sugar in my good friend’s mind
The difference between me and you
Is that the madness
Wants me forever
Bright lights behind hyena eyes
I mean, if I had to fall in love today
My grandchildren would be doomed
Flush against my face
I hold the gun
Only to make sure that my hand is real
I am one argument beyond the possibility
Of being one person
A pair of apartments
Defining both my family
And political composure
Books behind my back
Bail money paved into the streets
Playing:
Euphoria
Euphoria
Cliché
Sharing a dirty deli sandwich with my friend
A cosmic tool counted on by scared people
Psychology of the mask now
Teeth of the mask again
Comments (1)
This is not poetry. It’s just senseless ranting and rambling.
There is no form, no structure, no meter; not even an attempt to consider any melodic quality. The line breaks are arbitrary. This freewriting project is meaningless and unimportant.
The only thing I have come to understand about the speaker in this “poem” is that he likes to complain. I bet the author is the same way.
This whole “free-verse” myth is nothing more than just that: a myth. It’s people like this guy who have ruined poetry by claiming that poetry, and art in general, are whatever you want them to be. Your kind have brought chaos and disorder the same way you’ve brought chaos and disorder to the streets of Portland, Kenosha, Oakland, Chicago, and more.