Jump-Cut Check-Ins

Check me out—
Check me in…

In the montage I ascend from the dashboard—
depart on the window dressed of spaniels—
and like the nude descending the staircase

I’m aggrieved.

For I know not where the primordial matter in the skin sack I’m in intends to go.

My watchword is wrecker—I’m a kickback president of threats.

There is a poet in my pocket that only manages: humbug! amidst the glossolalia.

I have an earwig in a sachet that transmits
opioid messages of dis-illusion.

I am not my vertigo—I intone in my inclination.

I’m the slacker that darkens as I upend—the king of stalemate bequests!

There are eddies in the rivulets that course thru my coagulated blood.

I am a godson among the startled—and humming a turd-tune I know . . .

Violin-leaves tar at the wings—
Dew-drug sinners eat garnet stopgaps—
There be rodent chocolates in the chinaberry cabinet—and three clear tools of destruction.

(I intend to use)

Come.
Appease.

What I’m Reading:

Because Indigenous Peoples did not live in societies that the colonizers understood, we were considered not civilized enough to govern ourselves. “It is on the British race, whether in Great Britain, or in the United States, or in the Colonies, or wherever it may be, that rest the highest hopes of those who try to penetrate the dark future, or who seek to raise and better the patient masses of mankind,” Britain’s Lord Rosebery told an Australian audience in 1883.

— Tanya Talaga / The Knowing: How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today – A Native American History and Canadian Memoir of Intergenerational Trauma