Saturday, January 22, 2011

Second part of a beginning of a manifesto

There is something entirely erotic about the way the diviner's hands move along the straw mat, touching the shells and rubbing them with chalk, something that happens before the chanting starts, and for me, it's a little bit like falling in love, because at that moment, everything is possible.

For all the eves and the eyes that passed through these flying windows over the course of 12 seasons, nothing could light up the visions of a night like the promise of things to come, and when they are laid out in succession, there is hope and sadness; hope, because some of these things seem likely, and sadness, because so many of them are true. Touching the air where the diviner is touching the tongues of the Orishas is planting the twisted roots of the feet & the spine in the center of a hurricane (sometimes it's the mountain, and sometimes it's the sea, but it always feels like a hurricane, because the Dead always come to pay their due, and ask for what they're owed for what they do).

I want to write you the poem that only you could understand, one that speaks to you like they speak to me, and if it's like trying to become divine while inhabiting this body, then that's what I'll do, even if I am torn apart again and again. Because I love to write you poems, and the ones I wrote on your belly are nothing like the ones you wrote on my back, so we're still even, and I never thanked you for your poems, and you never thanked me for mine, love means never having to say thank you, or I'm sorry, because that's up to the Dead to decide which nights gratitude and regret come out to tango, shadows of the thing we were, or maybe we were the shadows of this. This is the night when the melancholy of the moon comes through the window and says that this is just another phase. But even in the smallest sliver, I see traces of you, and when there is no moon, I listen to your absence and wonder if you hear the sounds of me not speaking a word about you, and not remembering a thing.

This phase of the moon is the space where the shells fall over the windows of the year, and the story begins with the black bird that flies above me while I fly through the streets, she is haunting me because she sees another cycle of grieving ahead, these months ahead are like waves, and in one breath I find you, and in another breath you lose me again, and these losses are never forever (which I did not suspect), and finding is never forever (which you told me), but goes on relentlessly. You are so many people. I love your faces. I watch them rise and fall on the mat of the moon, where some signs I recognize, and some are entirely new, and there are those that hint at something entirely unknowable from this vantage point. Eye can't see, and the evening is fading, just like every other version of you that I loved, lost, and mourned.

I wanted to write you a poem that had nothing to do with you, one where you couldn't see yourself reflected at all, but all these words do is try to reflect, because the words are like shells, making patterns that you are meant to learn and understand. And I haven't learned a thing. Except. Your mother taught me some things. Those nights when I was out on the sea, waiting for the storm to bring the next landlove closer, and you were dancing with the ugly boys, she taught me some things. There is a stone in my mouth where your heart used to be, and there are seven signs written on seven bones on my back. They add to the songs that you wrote there. The ones about everything being forgotten, the ones about everything being forgiven, and the ones about everything turning inside out. When you crawled into my skin you stained the third layer, the one that can't be reached except by knife point, and there's no music without blood, and no life.

This window will open and birds will fly back and forth, and no one will speak a word, because there's nothing left to be said, because it's a story that gets told on the bones of the living while they live, pulling us into another story, another version of you and another version of me. You, like a cold baby bird in my throat, never leaving my mouth, and since I can't throw you off, I will carry you with me, until you turn into something else, until your faces become the faces that I can't predict, that no diviner could account for, and no Orisha would ever announce. You come without warning, a sudden storm on a still night, and when I ask how you found me, you open your mouth and take out my heart, and show me the places where I invited you, in between the lines of waiting and sadness, and when you say if I find you I will lose you, I tell you that when you lose me you will find me.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Beginning of a manifesto of Prophecy

Invocation for a year to start, with outlines for a map to leave the shore and launch into the sea.

Theater of Longing: Done. Really, this is done. No desire to return to that sea or that shore (that's a lie). Have we mined it all to find ourselves comfortable with the one we found (the place where longing can sit on the tongue, burning words into the mouth without dissolving it?)? ???
Like grief, this longing, this one that stays, the one that lasts at the bottom of the stomach of the stomach (inux5), this is only and nothing less than the amount that we can still live with. No one of us is able to live with the same amount, and this is why we can no longer use the word we. We simply have to stopped, and this is why we no longer say "we."
But we long, oh, we still long, but not for the same things (a lie) from the same source (oh, we are so lying tonight!). Lying lied laying or well lain.

Theater of Death: Done, and not by us. (here, by us I mean we).

Theater of Death and Longing: Oh, this was good, and not done, this was sexy and spooky and reminded me of you (just like everything) ((and by you, I mean we)). Sexy & spooky enough to get all the spirits up and howling through the house, and they always told me to keep saying your name until it burned a hole through my tongue (but it never burned through, that was their joke). ((ha ha very fucking funny they are)). (((oh, this is already too personal, and i'm exposing too much, but here's a secret: I said too much to the wrong people, but I never gave them a glimpse of the best parts of you, because I buried them in the dark part of my stone heart when you showed them to me in the dark and by the end of that first night, when I was trying not to see your name on the walls in the dark I was torn in a thousand pieces in the dark, and put back together in the dark, and I will show you what they taught me in the dark when you come to see my new work in the dark, and I promise I will recognize you, because you know how I know how to recognize you in the dark))).
Death and Longing: this involves-/involved/will done has involved/lagrimas para todos involucrados-the future and the past, just enough, to lay the foundations for a theater of Divination.

Divination, nation, nation (better with the sound effects in my head, and pictures of exploding giraffes).

Theater of Divination: a place where multiple realities and levels of meaning intersect and interact so that the perceiver makes connections and recognizes patterns (and patters) ((but not like easy like, I mean, we're not going to spell it out for you, the bones don't spell words, although sometimes they whisper, "your lover is an asshole, and it's time, oh, it's time to go...")) ((that kind of thing never happened to me, though, and by that I mean we, and so, and so, this is not about you, and here, by you I mean my first real love, Kristi Cook, who left me because she did not like my Sam Cobra doll, oh, I remember, I do, I remember everything))
These patterns that the perceiver can recognize are in themselves the very act of divination, so they can see the patterns of their own desire laid before their feet, and reflect on where they are, and what they want, and what they have to do to get to where they want to be, given the circumstances (not so mutable, I mean, this isn't about creating a kind of art that tells people they can realize their dreams, because it is apparent that things are indeed even stupider than we could have imagined, and that our intelligence cannot save us, but it can make other things possible...some dreams are for the children, and some are for the ones not even born...(that is not a lie).

Death & the Unborn: (the love not yet is the one that we really miss, the love that is never born is one that never dies and that one can never be mourned...the love not yet carries its own seeds of death not yet, and if we live in the future as well as the past, we can mourn for the already even if it is not yet, but oh, "What a lover gives is better than justice." - Gandhi)--
The present, the performers or the perceivers, the land of the living-->mourning & desiring all at once, but also breathing, and investing that breath in this space, this place right here, so. So, so, so.

A cycle that begins with Prophecy. Taking the order of diloggun, and speaking as if from the mouths of the wives of Orunmila: Oshun, Yemaya, Yewa, and how their energies make them particularly adept at designing and divining futures, with promises, threats, and a deep and burning love (right through the tongue) ((I never met anyone who could do that)) (((if i did I would marry her, and by her I mean you, and by I, I mean eyes, I mean, just watch this next part)))

(not yet. not yet the next part. you will have to come back to see)

We are going to start working on a new project on January 20th, because that's enough time by now to say this new year is well under way, and so far is filled with tremendous hope and angst, and the ghosts that may come have already revealed themselves, and all the longing from the last year is dead, as dead as the dirt, where things come back to life.....o don't read too much into that, but there's so much I want to tell you, it's been too long since you were here, and suddenly, suddenly this is an art where lovers meet and say I am sorry, but they don't know what they're sorry for, because no one knew the future before it happened...)))))))))
Oh, oh, oh, but Kassandra does, and this next one is going to be about her.
You should come.
(yes, I mean like that)
((we can help))
(((and by we, I mean tongues)))

Lies<-->Revolve
Liar<-->Revolution

And I thank you once again.

Let's go.

MANIFESTO OF CROSSED ONTOLOGIES Everybody (and by everybody I don ’ t mean everybody I think I mean one person, and I mean you, in par...