After Uvalde, Buffalo
Notebooks: May 24th, 2022
AFTER UVALDE, BUFFALO let joy be the weapon that saves you because the men had all folded up and snapped shut like flowers in spring a jack in a box broken open the children inside their fists full of peonies * We’ve played this script enough to know that all the anti-racism in the world won’t be enough to make it end. Racism just a symptom, as painful as that is to admit, or feel in the bones. It’s the loneliness of this world we live in, immense and empty days, one piled one piled one on top of the other. * Let your mind wander. Let it find never-ending questions [unfinal solution] it makes sense why they would kill when they felt like that their bodies acting evolutionarily nothing to condemn no diagnosis just the fragile tether to the living world that could have kept them, and him in it together * You may not want to hear this; you may not be ready, but it is joy, what is needed – precondition of safety * it makes sense * as a child I played a game in which I was a big-breasted woman with guns running and jumping. in the beginning, before i developed skill, over and over i would be eaten by a tiger; the distinct horror and pleasure of it, to diminish that virtual (woman) body over which i held total control; to then begin to climb and shoot my enemies (whoever was in front of me): and that is gaming. the world when you are 18 and a boy is pixelated and contingent, built exactly for, or to produce you. my love and I we made one too. he’s not yet two. the school he finds in dreams will fold and explode – i can’t imagine this thing that keeps happening like a restart button stuck and keeps sticking * one day i climbed the rock and got her out (the woman i was controlling) and shot and shot. the tiger didn’t eat me. * how would we get him out? to touch the wound that spreads and let my hand linger upon it. we named our boy a salve of God a fact of which, embarrassed, I diminish. I saw pictures of the babies, my love says. [she doesn’t want to send him.] * how desperately, desperately alone do you have to feel to do it? what circle of hell is that gravity that pulls us to it? evil an algorithm, predictive. no one who could dance, who could sing / could do such a thing. [joy the innoculation.] * joy, the inoculation JOY, THE INOCULATION connection * The ones that die in Ukraine here Are of a war that’s ten feet tall It faces us, when try to sleep Inverted hearts come beating stop. * My child’s hand is full of grass Each futile line too short