Wednesday, May 16, 2018

16 May 2018



I want to write an honest sentence. I was or was not at the Trump tower meeting and I did or did not agree to receive incriminating evidence. I heard and did not hear the shama thrush at one distance, an ambulance at the other. I watched and did not watch a man scream at a Muslim woman. They were killed, are being killed, someone kills them at the border. Lust for fixity, for an anti-ocean, paved expanse where water has been. We sit to watch a white screen, but it's still populated by terrorists and aliens and conspiracy theories. Abraham Zapruder films the screen, but all he sees is lava spatter from a president's head, as if natural violence matched the force of a rifle's bullet. He says he's measured the toxicity of his anger and means to flush it out, but it falls like ash on Pahala, on Punalu`u, on South Point. You must forgive comes without an instruction manual. Her civil defense brochures sit at angles in front of a vase of flowers. That's documentation for you, with an aesthetic grace note. He infused Versailles' ponds with perfume, as if to bring another century forward, back. What we smell makes us sad, he says. For me, it's cat piss, the stink of our late cats in the stink of our present. Memory is also smell, insubstantial, unanchored to this earth, wind's intricate chances taken. Photo of an offering to Pele, ti leaves bound in a circle, pohaku at the center. Without a name, it's just a mountain. With one, it's the ethical destruction of a desecrated place. The man without legs who slung rocks at Israeli forces was shot dead yesterday. Maged reminds us he had a name. A UN soldier ducks as a sniper's bullet lands beside her. “Tone deaf murderers” suggests that somewhere there's perfect pitch.

--16 May 2018

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