This was inspired by two poems. "Milos" by Anis Mojgani and "Proposal" by Mikael de Lara Co.

The question I tried to answer while writing this poem was this: What would a prayer sound like without a god? Or, if humanity was its own god, what would it pray to itself? A bit lofty, I know, but there.

Apologies for the poor quality. Laptop mic, and random sounds were me clicking.

Image was created by an artist named Karl Nicholason, and is the chapter page for Specialized Cells and Tissues from a book called Biology Today. http://50watts.com/An-Artist-s-Interpretation-of-a-Flashback-Biology-Today-3

Prayer

Let us take our bodies and offer them up to ourselves.
Let us take our hands and unball them from the cages of self-made fists
else they lock themselves in place.
Let us take our faces and leave smiles as heirlooms, happiness as inheritance,
to give what comes naturally is an act of fairness.
Let us take the footsteps made from walking through empty streets
and save them for when we have no strength for heartbeats.
Let us take all the bottles we’ve emptied and hang them over our gardens
like a giant wind chime. Bring me the strongest wind and whether or not
I am heard, I will make music.
Let us take our voices and bless them with amplifiers. And let us take
our amplifiers and blast them on platforms.
Let us take our crowns and the thorns that adorn them
and cultivate our pride into roses.
Let us take our words and let every quotation be an open quotation,
let every period grow into an ellipsis until the front page bears another
headline that speaks of good news.
Let us take our hearts and make them as heavy as anchors,
and in turn, let us love oceans.
Let us take our weapons and lay them down, knowing
that we have already been fought for. Let us walk through
our museums, and watch from the seats of our little coliseums,
remember our lions and Jackson Pollocks and know
we are fanged messes, sharp and splattered and tattered and masters
of our own chaos.
Let us take the torches made for lighting caves and walls with hunters
and animals drawn, the light is gone and I have extinguished the flame
but I have written my name on these walls, and when time causes these homes
to crumble, the ones who come after me may roll a labelled stone, as I have,
endlessly, regretlessly, feeling that weight on my bones knowing that the rock
that I was told to roll may or not be the role I was meant to rock, feeling these fibers
pulled taut and plucked to play the song that sings what I am not so I may  know
in the quiet who I am and in the ring that echoes in the cavern of my ears, why.
Let us take the nails that hold us together. Let us take these wooden planks and put them
together to form crosses. Let us take our crosses and give them our bodies
and offer them up to ourselves.

I offer myself to me because I am what I deserve and deserve what I am.
Never mind vengeance, never mind expectation, let us hinge on hope
and swing that door open like each hand is wrapped around
the stem of a champagne bottle. And when the city you’ve called home for so long
contorts itself into a labyrinth, know its double joints and jackhammered stones
and what turns are disguised as broken bones, what homes are praying for people
and what rooms are waiting for wrecking balls. And when you are tired of taking,
give yourself time until you are no longer tired. And when you are no longer afraid to say
you belong to the world, and that the world belongs to you, gently lift the veil
from its face, be honest with your promise, and say: I am not ruled by circumstance.


Prayer

Partly inspired by The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart by Jack Gilbert (http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/theforgottendialect.html), and one night when I was angry and anxious.

I fear I might have mispronounced "Mityushikha".

Image: Untitled (Skull) by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Words:
Back to the drawing board, they say. In the beginning, the world was created in seven days, they say, while the bones of a mammoth sink deeper into the earth and millennium-old protozoa mourn the day the ark left them. This is a gift, they say, while a king five hundred years ago sends a ship to search for spices, and a wave of galleons return with slaves chained to the gods of their people, the ghosts of their ghosts. This is necessary, they say, while the AN602 Czar Bomba becomes fire in Mityushikha Bay and breaks more windows than an abusive father, stumbling drunk into his home’s broken arms hoping the brittle of his family is soft enough to cradle his addiction. Rushing towards tomorrow’s today, we go back to the drawing board, cue chalk sticks skidding like race cars on fire.

The US Military’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon was code-named after a poem. “Bones to philosophy, milk to faith,” John Donne wrote, who understood that there were many ways to hope but few ways to heal. Somewhere, in another era, the son of a Baby Boomer is sporting a turtleneck, wrapping his hands comfortably around a coffee mug. Later, he will take his popcorn from out the microwave and read about trains flying off their tracks. The glare of the screen becomes his face, the flowers are thirsty, and someone you love is eating poems like vitamins hoping she gets healthy… or at least not sick enough to never have to read another poem again, believing that words which are said but aren’t meant can be inoculated. To language, we flutter like a swarm of bats to the shoulders of St. Francis of Assisi, eager to drink the blood from his holy neck—love and God, we say, hope and heal, we say, while a memory of the utterance of “indio” stings the brain of our lineage and we throw around “whore”, “nigga”, “art”, like it’s nothing. People mean well but forget: the heart is also responsible for pumping blood to the brain. After we discovered fire and invented the wheel, we needed to find ways to describe the joy we felt, looking at fire and wheels, and under the tongue the words “inferno” and “steamroller” announced their presence to history’s invisible, and innumerable audiences. This is my request to you. Take every crumpled draft in your wastebasket. Say it with me. In the beginning, this was a gift, and it was necessary. And we go back to the drawing board, to make it necessary.


Bones And Milk

image by Bence Hajdu

This be the season of misgivings
Crook shilling, shadows livin’ in nooks and cavities chillin’ villainous
And dastardly, cats with claws masterfully carved
And straight from the factory, smoke billowing casually
Those supposedly more enlightened are more than frightened
Building ziggurats like they could kill a god with knowledge cue Metropolis
Wouldn’t you like to believe the eye of the needle could spy on the people
And try to be equal in a one-size-fits-all kinda way?
Do you remember the first days of creation?
Fathom that vast expanse, dark and formless forces
Coursing through the source of all things, calling forth
The scientist and sorcerer, the hunter and the forager,
The warden and the prisoner, the concept and the integer
The ones who intuit the mist
Courageous enough to insist that disorder could be trapped inside a fist
Tense up and clench, fuck the ones that don’t last cuz the ones who go mad
Are the ones with no gonads
The liars who blame the environs, like actually we have
Plurality perpetuating panic and powering paralysis
But this is all that is had
Sweet child, budding Morningstar
Keep a can of mace in your pocket
A knife in your sleeve and a photo in your locket
And your wings in the closet for the day when the floor falls
Under you climb to sun but it’s your call
Daedalus bearing the burden of witness
Wax wings burning like nobody’s business
You are both the son and father grasping to understand
All I have is my hands
All I have is my hands

Season of Misgivings

Image: Still from Tamako Market

A few notes:
1) The title is a line taken from Ze Frank's Human Test, the compressed version of which can be found here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccIt-qRQBoI
2) The track is of course Claire de lune, but it's not me playing the melody. I'm speaking over a recording sent to me years ago, by an old friend I don't see much of these days. It's been sitting in my inbox for about three years.

And that was it, really.
You don’t throw a bunch of stones into the air
and expect the ground to catch a house,
but that was what happened. Several houses.
Some facades still wear their Halloween decorations
like medals. Others prefer to keep their Christmas lights
on throughout the day. But back to the stones—this was not
the intended effect, but the desired one, given hindsight.
Maybe because the ground was soft and firm, so the stones
could find it in themselves to climb on top of each other.
Maybe the wind and the government were involved
in some way. Or maybe, the stones considered the sky,
and said no, the sky will lower itself upon us in its own time,
as it always does. Which is to say, this does not prevent
matter from rising upwards. Dust, and vapor, and breath—
the things you felt and I felt, the things you felt I felt and I felt you felt,
good intentions piled on each other, like discarded clothing. Or stones.
Without the aid of a blueprint? Sure. I was never one to argue
in favor of a watchmaker, but I can’t help but feel that this is clockwork.
That maybe residential projects are just forms of scabbing which attest
to how the world can wound you. Maybe rooftops are always the second stop
for the train of thought that begins at the station of your name. Maybe forgiveness
is just another flavor for forgetting. Skin, and sweat, and thought—
look at how much of this doesn’t matter anymore,
and yet I still feel the need to build contingencies. I don’t know
if I have a Plan A but this is my Plan B: when the stones crumble,
I’ll toss them into the air again. The birds will keep flying
this way anyway. In the same formations.

Futures Will Happen, Regardless

Becoming

Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shihab Nye, read by Elijah Pascual

So by Philip Booth, read by Elijah Pascual

The Patience of Ordinary Things by Pat Schneider, read by Elijah Pascual

My name is Jam. I sing for a band called Imelda. Sometimes I make spoken word poems.

Elijah Pascual

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