28 July 2017

I want to write an honest sentence about pay raises and suicide nets, about private resignations and public firings, about the age of my daughter's bones. I want to write an honest sentence about the rain that falls in coherent syntax on wide green leaves. Roof song is a random percussion. The genie flies a big plane and makes tremendous decisions. He keeps stuffing paper back in a bottle—old deals that never took, pieces of a Russian phrase book. Outside, a native bird sits on a leaf until I realize it's leaf only, resembling bird. I listen to bird songs on my computer, but they're no more memorable to me than the rain. I am afraid for my daughter's bones. “Don't protect their heads when you push them in the car,” he tells police. “They don't shoot our beautiful girls, because that would be too quick. They carve them up with knives.” Grammar is either ethical or it's not. A knife's clean cut makes noun and verb agree on what's left on the table. The water next to a curb in Hilo smelled of dead fish. There's pornography in the air, but it cannot promise pleasure. If you can't speak well of others, then say you'll kill them, dispose of their bodies at the tip. The Protocol of the Elders of Zion was a damn good story, but no one should write fan fiction about it. I am afraid for my daughter's bones, though they're as white as mine. Bones become matter at the tip. We recycle persons, not plastic. When we grow, if we grow, resilience is a good salary and no student debt. My daughter and her sister giggle themselves to sleep on a futon under the rain on the plastic roof. They say the nights are scary, so dark. The genie wants it so. A mob of one is contagious in its vitriol; you might only later look in the mirror to see the face you first identified with your name. It was arbitrary, but someone gave it to you. The genie knows to call you by a name, but his calling is taking, not adding on. The wall will be see-through, just as we are to him, and he to us. To see is not to act, alas.

--28 July 2017