Does all evil emanate from a single source?
And do the hundred thousand elaborations of bad
Over which puritans and pundits fight it out on the crust
Of the earth correlate to the lack of spiritual and political
Foundation that would make it easy to see the Marxist reality
That the corporate and billionaire class is what’s really got to go?
That my racism and yours, our failure to love, are masquerading
As things that’re wrong with you & me when we’re just walking symptoms
Of the structural reality into which trees, poems, tears & miracles
Introduce a rending, streaming, higher truth, a better flow, the holy sheen of life...
And the matter of what is in our hearts and my deep
Desire to change, ultimately, and the people I show up for
And the causes I serve is personal, a matter I won’t hector
You to give me credit for? I’m still not a good enough writer.
The personal is an old-fashioned fantasy. Like certain magazine
Feelings it does still hold sway over me….
I’m just trying to put my guts
Back in my body cos they’re spilling out. I’m just trying
To shove my brains back in my head and remind them that they’re MINE
Too much evil hath made public discourse stupid and boring
Too much binary thinking and even the UFO-heads and channelers
Are all saying versions of the same thing
Look I can’t prove that I’m not a benevolent priestess from Arcturus
But even if that were the case, I know I’m only a semi ok human being
There is a decency, a middleness, that seems to give us major anxiety
Here on Earth and that seems to me a goodness artists and radicals
Those attracted to extremity, me, those who tend to wallow in negativity—
Neglect. I mean, it pretty much seems as though
Wherever we are we come to Earth, if you’re reading this, we come to Earth to be human
The sexual misery in the theories of QAnon is truly amazing
It’s a catastrophe of the American imagination that even conspiracy theories are.... so bad
Right? No freedom even in lunacy
Now what does that say?
No freedom even in lunacy
Moon, Mother, hast thou forsaken me?
Still there’s maybe one good thing I can say about the USA right now
For such a young empire wading through so much evil, maybe it’s something
That even in our advanced state of decay
A lot of us are looking at ourselves and endeavoring
Furiously to find better ways
I mean, when my soul is fucking dying I can feel it
And when I’ve done wrong the punishment begins instantly
In the pit of my guts. We will build restorative justice from the pit
Of our guts. Other grids will hold the truth of cities. Reparations, repair
The notion of mending itself— did you know that’s an old theology?
That old theology is coming back. But where could I go
To say that. I’ve always wondered what the place for such things was
Other than a poem, or loose talk with the ones I love, or a world I know exists
But yet see only in flashes. I resist to put it in an essay
For there you might praise me for my intelligence. I’d like to turn it into beauty
But Practicing artlessly this art allows me to lay the feeling naked
Before your eyes resisting to make use of it…
I believe we are a young species ignorant of our origins
I believe Earth is a school where we learn to stop treating life so horribly
Do I believe that? I just typed it. Yeah. I think I do.
But can we please not be too uptight about it. I’m inspired by you
Still practicing this old technology
I mean, writing’s pretty old. But poetry, song— medicinal
Speech— much older.
Why did they ever do that
Start writing it down? What does it mean I can’t really speak my soul
Except it flows down my arms into you?
Tell me. Who first wrote it down?
What did that do to our mind. Could I ever have been a singer?
Poetry used to be speech. Magic used to be a flow. What happens when you can’t remember
Everything you need to know?
Have to look it up? Have to ask someone else? Need an app
To prepare you for how you might feel today?
The first utterance it’s said belonged to the Creator.
Later, writing became important.
Latterly we write in number, as the Kabbalistic holy of holies
Is said to have done. Still,
People used to say “It is written.”
Now most writing is selling.
I predict the written word will be valued even less
A hundred years from now. This is why
We have to practice telepathy, the art of memory
And the trickster’s art of pure speech....
What about the prison of a certain mode of megahertz
Thru which pop music pumps itself into me
Right down to this very day? “TV rots your brains”
Is a boomer phrase, but so much of manifest
Reality is bad TV, which you can scroll vertically
The perpendicular opposite of an old-time holy book
I feel like there are all these neglected vehicles for time travel lying around
Guitars and banjos, that Jew’s harp over there, the histories of dead religions
I wouldn’t recommend exactly reading but kind of squinting at or maybe brushing against
The way in the old world you’d brush against someone at a party
And never actually meet talk or fall in love till three years later
It’s so weird, who we are, what we’ve become, this embarrassment
Of riches we’ve been endowed and have only the faintest clue
How to use, and I have to keep reminding myself, Take what you need
And leave the rest. Take what you need and leave the rest.
Like good poems written by dead assholes who I’m in no danger of getting ruined by
Do you realize the lengths people used to have to go
To get something written, and once written and the people alarmed,
Safely hidden? Sometimes I feel like my body’s a jar
Whose contents are either treasure or sedition
And I spend all this energy trying to act like I don’t know
So you won’t notice and I’ll be safe.
Do you know how much I’ve been trolled, stalked, defamed
Assaulted, and hurt in my life? Oh but I don’t
Wanna talk about it. It isn’t interesting. It’s common.
I don’t want you to sympathize with me because I’ve been hurt
I don’t even want you to appreciate me if I ever manage to say something smart
I’m just trying to see if there’s another place we can go than this
If I put words in a certain order, and trick you into neither fearing nor feeling intimidated by me
Distracting you with my idiocy, maybe you’ll feel a little relief, maybe the invisible
World will come a little closer...
I’ve learned how to carry it around, my jar, and I’m even over
How I just feel dead sometimes and always have. Just dead.
I’m even over that. Know how to handle it.
Sometimes I see how stupid it is that I still fantasize about domestic bliss
When most of my heroes lived lives of hazard and torment
And actually it’s really very nice here in this big house
But the other reality gnaws at me, you know? Having to try and make a go
Of an honest life when there are children in cages and entire
Generations incarcerated and a kind of preening evil whose peripherality
To me and the ones I love and what matters to me is a total illusion
The evil is the center of things, the water thru which we row
A grinning skeleton is dancing his demented jig on the charnel ground. It me.
And I hate when white ladies say “It me.” I just put that there
To see how it would feel. Didn’t like how it felt. Won’t do it again.
I know happiness is in action
And the only solution is to DO more, that’s always been
How it works for me, at least.
I just have this feeling for language
That I can’t shake. I feel it. I want a musical life.
It’s kind of crazy the way Jazz fueled Jack Kerouac and On the Road fed
The rock stars who came after, the Acid Tests, the whole white counterculture
Did women ever really get a sexual revolution? Has that happened?
Will there be a new renaissance of improvisatory music, queer Jewish
Chicken farmers, reparations in cash and land to all descendants
Of enslaved people in the USA? And an energy flowing like nectar
Into the deep pits and scars of identity, everything it gave us,
Everything it took away? Have I eaten too much plastic
To be redeemed? My mom is drunk in a midtown hotel. She’s ok.
I found out the housing voucher I managed to get her over three years
Going to Bronx Housing Court on her behalf is actually paying the bill.
I found out something I tried and did for her didn’t totally fail.
Why am I telling you this now? I can’t write a poem without mixing things up.
I have one boring problem and all my other faults dance around it in a Busby
Berkeley concatenation. I so often catch myself
Not wanting to know what I know, I said to Dave last night
On our way to the bodega. It’s like the nanoparticulate of Americanness
These times have deposited into me. Addicted to this idea of innocence
As the condition for making anything new, I recognize the blanching
White cruelty and horny boyishness in the swelling of my voice
When I start to feel a little free. It’s so weird to have this man in me.
Ken Kesey saying with unnerving sensuality that “a man has the right
To be as big as he feels himself to be” Yesterday’s counterculture
And yesterday’s angels and somebody else’s beauty and joy.
And yet I feel this swelling in my heart with the Leonine times
I feel how sick it made me when I tried to eat my own aura and tried
To grow small. In my two years of homelessness I longed to expand
To my natural size and taste. Can’t we share that.
For some reason last year in the fires in California I developed
A strange affection for “End of the Line” by the Traveling Wilburys
Dad music my personal dad never listened to
It was a weird sonic amulet protecting J’s truck from the flames
But to think of only protecting one person, the one you love
Even that has got to go…..
Where does your imagination go? The cosmos itself, language,
The idea of being really truly felt and seen and known, which I no
Longer even imagine in dreams? I’m either trying to write about mass
Stupefaction or seeming to write about that while actually
Making a melody with the junk I found where no one else was looking.
Maybe I’m not working hard enough at art
Maybe I’m working too hard
America, I’ve been trying to correct my defects and not be a problem
For anybody else ever again — Puritanical
Overcoming, you are a boring and unshakeable mistress.
But making it pay makes it American.
When I think of the years I couldn’t listen to jazz I recognize
How dead my heart was then, how afraid I was to feel the other worlds
Even now, what if I told you if I didn’t write and read poetry
I’d be a monster basically?
A zombie.
Well what would that say about me?
No Ariana, wrong question. Like I said earlier
This is an old and under-researched technology
It isn’t about me
Its purpose remains obscure to me
Something about channeling energy
Didn’t Roland blow a horn? My people
Make primal sounds thru dead ram parts. What does it mean when Gabriel
Blows his horn. The trumpets of Jericho. Time’s up. Music is as close to the universe
As I can feel. Closer than a crystal. Closer even than you...
Ariana Reines is a poet. A Sand Book (2019) won the Kingsley Tufts Award and was released last month in the UK.