DSM – Partial Manual (excerpt)
“And so poetry is not a shopping list …”
– June Jordan
“The next time you begin
to question your existence
Remember
Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt
was a Black Teenager.”
– Audre Lorde [from her archives]
______
Radical imagining as evolutionary project
Relinquishing imaginative power as central defeat
Radical imagining as evolutionary project
Relinquishing imaginative power as central defeat
Radical imagining as evolutionary project
Relinquishing imaginative power as central defeat
______
serendipity will arise. follow the instinct of the body, even when it wants funk & hide,
even when the wind merits distortion & you can’t follow your nose to your first name
or even to your root of bone. small things bloom and litter in your fingertips. in 2006
the fbi released a memo about how terrorist groups—white—infiltrated local police.
what else has infiltrated this body. how astounding and blinding we want to be good,
to be seen. this a love song to an antelope, a papaya, a glistening thing shooting
through wide grass or holding court splitting in our throat. in all, imagine you are the
liminal in a curious fold: the luminous ones as of yet not failed, not yet made dead.
______
Instructions: tread lightly on poetic flourish. follow June’s: say the accurate thing.
interdict the suicide, no casual disquisition. prepare for how in doing so you come
head to head with expendability. wasting (of) (this) body is both aim and afterthought.
better to speak, remembering … you know
by now
the rest also, one may choose to not prepare at all
