selections from “Noct-”
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
– W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks
“It looked like a demon”
– Darren Wilson’s testimonial before a grand jury.
“And I, now, with a mouth to speak, openly moan as chaos reshapes itself in my form”
– Vievee Francis “Creation Myth” from Horse in the Dark
*
Liberation:
Good boy meets good
Boy paradigm
What a wonderful accomplishment
Sex
polarizes bodies
Be nightkind
prowl now
Your goal is germinating sentence fragments
Your Sex is small redundant letters
Rearranged pronounceable
in your chest becoming
your spine
Little electricity, Feel
your swollen size Your core
phrase of power
Your thighs your belly
Phrase with intensity your genitals’
Charm and gamble routine
You are ho-hum
You’re a fool wish for untimely death with a lowercase d,
humdrum to a longterm partner
Smoke feels mystical but notorious
Just the orgasm, the excitement of
You
You cheat
Mystic odd numbers befits threesomes
You and your partner suffice
Something special is happening
I encounter time
And really care
Go bareback, speak fiction
ritual to fuel sinister contact
A reddish nothing
you can be handy
you slip away as if keeping one secret
phrase of power phrase mental drift
the heart dark sphere
Your cheating is never foolproof
Clubnight
Mating dance
With all its pitfalls
Body: a manmade chemicaljourney
dear mythology of sinister tone
what resembles fright?
what comes from elsewhere
and appears to be you
out-of-body? the unsaid
forms a pathway to the low world
seeing with the soul’s way of seeing
What do you suppose it means?
the hellish vision? A man both me
and not
