Kyle Dacuyan
Money
I push you from one place to another place
And you hit me
Just the way I want you to
I like to wear the filth of it
Glut I am for worth The symbol
Little pain pig that I am
Groveling at the altar you are history
A fairground prison and bordello
Time you are persona
You don’t get to be just anybody
Through some do unto others hat-trick
Not a single person without desire once
Violence need or boredom
I suppose you Could be a skosh less verbal
Could hardly darling me more softly
I could never have enough A function
Seeing as I do most clearly
When I am reflected in your eyeball
Morning is a strip receding on the platform
Mindless and erotic as a jellyfish twitch
You are what I say And vice versa And there is nowhere
We can either of us be more
Without a deprivation
Where did you come from exchange or account
Claptrap immiserator Tautological oil
You bear me I throw you At no one in particular
Garbage I am hot for you
A jackhammer twisting in the dirt I make myself
A gash To make you There is nothing
I can do that changes
What they will do to you
Or with Or from There is no
Conceivable elimination Ultimate appeasement
Nothing I say undoes the will
No matter how much
I reject you
Acquire Dispute
The substance you compose of me
Only through complete abjection am I free
Of obsession Addiction
To get-ahead decorum unmoored at last
From boundless lack is the parabola where the grabbing stops
The body’s loss From which jubilee
In the future I came here to tell you
There was no use for you any longer
We criminalized value then we forgot
Crime as a classification of behavior we forgot you entirely
Use Was a quality of relation
We forgot
In the future we were governed by collective pleasure
Then we forgot government and were utterly attention
Worship we were song forgetting
The drone absolved of time signature harmonics an on and on we were
Forgetting free from force
Combustion of the mind into particulate
All particular fear failure disappointment post-corporeal
The vessel and the blood boiling into air between us
Kissing we were breathing And dying from the temporary ecstasies we let go
Into the depths of one another
Go We went We sang And God
Was a feeling we gave to ourselves
Compassion
Is to suffer
With. Not care
In fact its
Inverse. Requires a
Leveling a plural
Subject. Prioritize every
Day a new
Undoing. Even if
A movement no
One will see.
The different logic
Possible if we
Changed the people
Occupying power over
Language. The professions.
Teachers doctors bosses
Judges. The lobbies
Who control the
Means that reproduce
The arguments. What
Illness is and
Order. The men
Who make the
Case. The interpreters.
I will never
Call him Justice.
Who govern definition.
The premise. The
Sculpture of a
System from documents
Their addenda and
Erosions. In whose
Frame the right.
The Right. To
Bear the violent.
All of it.
The arms we
Bear we hoard.
For what. The
Symbol of protection.
We must protect.
Who governs must.
The from. The
Conditions which trigger.
Whose shadow arouses.
Who profits from
Our terror. Whose
Right. The. Definite
Article of which
Universal. Right what
Is. By who
Ordained. And when
And under what.
The provenance is
What. What if
In an act
Of self defense.
What if in
The course of
Self-preservation. To who.
They. Them. Those
People. Over there
Approaching. What if
A child. What
If my child.
I would do
anything. The root
Of fear is
If. The object
The any. Who
Construes the two.
Who fashions their
Horizons. Of nearly
200 constitutions in
The world today
Only three include
A right to
Bear arms. Mexico
Guatemala the United
States of America.
Ours the only
Of the three
With boundless provision.
Mexico Guatemala the
United States of
America. Makes you
Think the girl
She was seven
Traveling from Guatemala.
Travel implies choice.
Revise. Seven she
Was fleeing north
Toward asylum. Days
Without water without
Rest. Days held
By the Border
Patrol. In whose
Arms. Seven she
Was seeking refuge
Seven and we
Killed her. We
Killed this child.
Use the proper
Subject verb object.
Jakelin Caal Maquin.
A name is
Not a symbol.
To say to
Form to hold
The cavern of
The missing. To
Account. For arms
The border. The
Men keeping watch
Of what we
Call security. The
Plural self we
Act in. Makes
You think the
Tears. What becomes
Impossible in a
State of dehydration.
The gas they
Use upon the
Migrants. They. Excuse
Me. We. We
Send to the
Capitol the architects
Of force. We
See the Warhol
And Wojnarowicz at
The Whitney. Where
The art was
Underwritten by the
Man who makes
The gas. The
Men who own
The companies that
Make the gas
The poison the
Suits the soldiers
And enforcers wear
To terrorize the
People. The prisons.
We the. Our
Culture. A taste
For blame more
Powerful than our
Will to divest.
Well if he.
If they. Exoneration
Of the self.
Well I am
Not. Well I
Don’t. I would
Never. And we
Share our stupid
Pictures to show
We saw the
Show. We are
A cultured people.
We march we
Read we brunch.
Look I mean
I. You see.
Wind barrels forth
From a gun
In the desert.
Every desert. A
Mother in the
Sun with her
Lungs full of
Sand. Leave it.
The man says
Of the body.
The wind will
Bury all of
Us. In January
In Kentucky in
A town a
Town away from
The country’s largest
Rifle manufacturer a
Child brought his
Father’s make to
School and opened
Fire and among
The first reporters
To arrive upon
The scene was
His mother. It
Is whose responsibility
To tell. To
Make sense if
We go back.
As is our
Way with if.
To seek the
Fork of not
And what. I
Stood some months
Later among the
Men who make
From the assembly
Lines of guns
A livelihood. Sir
The man said
To the Governor.
Sir I am
A card carrying
Member of ___.
I make a
Living making ___.
But this must
Stop. Sir --
The governor shh’ed
The man. The
Microphone who has
It. And whose
Voice must stand
Without. I stood
More recently before
One of the
Oldest living things
In North America.
An oak tree
In a Carolina.
The tree precedes
The colonies. The
People milling in
Its shade naïve
Of difference. Time
Like a blood
Or root happening
At once in
All directions. Other
Time inside of
This time the
Tree photosynthesizing light
History confluence will
charity taking all
Of the invisible.
Fashioning a self.
The body dissolves
Into minerals that
Feed the worms
Which till the
Soil which nourishes
And keeps the
Tree in place
The tree detoxifies
The air. Into
Which we have
Released our bullets
And our waste.
The byproducts of
What we imagined
To be necessity.
We need one
another. We need
one another.
Capillary action of
The abject heavenward.
When a child
Dies in her
Memory we plant
Sometimes a tree.
Free Air
It wasn’t
what I needed
it to be
but I want
to believe
it will become
The More You Have It the Less It Exists
I was looking for sleep but everything was glass I kept walking into the walls
of corridors I could not perceive Hello I would say when my path crossed another’s
Hello I am looking for sleep Only to recognize upon touching
the translucent surfaces what it was that came between us Which was only everything
Everywhere invisible corners and senseless boundaries But what is sense relative
to unrelenting nonsense I could hear tapping overhead as though the Morse code
of a neighbor I would never meet It was a vast stage an array of scenes
of people oblivious in our respective labyrinths Or perhaps there were no people
on the other side Or no other side at all I grew tired No
I could not remember a time before exhaustion I saw a person emerging
from a yellowjacket nest and sieged with swarm A legless man walking
the perimeter of a gas station with his hands I saw a woman climbing
into a trunk of mud and emerging and reentering some abject ritual
and children shackling the wrists of other children behind their backs
and everywhere deeper I went there were others on parallel separate tracks
with rising tide and fire at their sides swallowing towers strip malls
the rows of houses and hybridized trees above-ground pools
clothes flapping on the line an abandoned weed-whacker leaning on the chainlink
with a Runs Good sign mountains of junk of refrigerators and dishwashers
the accessories of what I imagined had once been domesticity
littering the monstrous coast the railroad flowers that die in the exhaust
And then I was running and I was flanked on both sides with streams of people
sleeping upright packed so closely they were standing Hello! I yelled
my palms and then my fists upon the glass I am looking for sleep but they were
sleeping and shuddering past me by conveyor And then I saw a child so wretched
and untouchable I knew him to be myself Pitiful a something
something plowing the earth with his horns rutting the long track he walked in
his back warped in a question mark of agony I could feel the fur of me bristle
with recognition I was this something the horizon of this child he was I
I he I wanted to say something to him he was waiting I could see he
could see I could see I would tell him to rest if I could tell him anything
he thought I thought I could see I could see he thought he was waiting I was
waiting to see I would tell him I was looking for sleep for you
you see I thought he was looking for thought I could see
I would say I am trying to look at nothing until I see something
I am trying to see he would tell of waiting I thought if I could tell him
I see you I would tell him he never sleeps I could see him waiting
I was always waiting I thought when I was him though I could not tell
if sleep was what I needed or if what he was was sleep or what I was
was need or want or waiting or what I was was thought
or if he could see that he was anything you are I would tell him
you are you are he thought I thought though he could never tell it I saw
nor rest and for the rest of time I spoke I told I thought
I needed I wanted I waited I waited for sleep but there
was no one there and nothing I could do
Kyle Dacuyan writes poems and makes performance. His writing has appeared in Ambit, The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, Social Text, and elsewhere. He is the Executive Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s.