Thursday, March 26, 2009

from Gift and Verdict: III



from Gift & Verdict

•••

Full foreground and shortcomings of this intercourse
if our voices mattered amid this kind of predictable
thinking, institution of secrets civil-silenced
or stammered-over without filling the gaps
in an ecstatic state
of clashing
consonants when it all comes off the jack-end
behind the back-alley store-front in pull-back
sway I mean I couldn’t care less
about anybody’s private life, but it helps
explain why total incompetents, with no
knowledge of the language or society, are
running the show
which is to beg it I
know and so self-inflicted I’m creaming over these
officers of the peace, joint chiefs of staff, no longer
anyone to punish me—and so extricate myself
from the weird undertow that kept me here to
begin with in acrimony of mind
and argument, in avulsion of what I weigh
when lending you power of attorney. . .

As when a machine rises to the surface
of the present like the completion
of a past, and it’s a point of rupture
from which a legacy will emerge
in the future, an evolution as per
all the creative forces of science art and social
promise, entangled in an emerging
sphere of abstract efflorescence, a blurring
effect over these agents of change
in places
where local language is deemed
insurgent, these truant cascades
of speech repeatedly coerced into

dropping all that ornamental excess—of parse,
spell and punctuate our thoughts
into the chilly spaces of the textbook if
we are to master the brawn
of power and knowledge,
a kind of opacity through
which the various will have
difficulty passing save in other ways
to be sorry I no say this more better
when the guh-g-g-guys call me sugar or sweetheart


Roberto Tejada

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