The debating circuit

In debates at school we despised extreme statements.
Just a single example would disprove them: no need for skill at all.

By college, to prove All A is B was the true measure of worth.
We set ourselves to complex and nuanced reasoning
Why A must be B
—whether A wished to be B, knew she was B, or showed any sign of being B,
Or not—
We marshalled History, Economics, Politics and Society
To confirm it. Who could withstand that terrible nexus?

Certainly not the adjudicator.
How clever we have been, here is the trophy to prove it.

How dull were those who resented debate on the grounds that
A isn't, after all, B, and
That we didn't think it important to know it
When we could simply argue.

Cartography

Missing something is writing a note in a blank space on a map. Leaving it blank is too much to bear; besides, we don't know what to do with ourselves then. A map of my life would be worth drawing; for one, it would be reassuring, because everything is there- all at once and without effort.
Here, on the hill, my castelo de san joao, complete with high fences and gargoyles on guard, and a little girl practising their faces out a window. Below, on the riverbank, twisting little dingy streets with bookshops and assorted alleyways where poets and the thinking sort stroke their chins at corners and stoke their fires in pretty reasonable cafes. Drifting aimlessly down the water reaches you eventually to the sea, past thickets teeming with undiscovered specimens of dubious emotional stability and adaptability to thought à la mode. Strewn among rock and sand along the seashore will be the comfortable huts: of indifferent quality and invisible to the discerning eye. There's quite a settlement of them, but all soggy at high tide. From there if one raises his head and looks, there is a steeple far inland, ringing its invitation.
The land is different here, rolling and green to the eye (for the Lord is a shepherd, is he not?) and every outcrop might hide multitudes, but there's no one to be seen around. And this is the rule: One never does know about what the others do. Away to the West there is a carnival always running, raucous music and dancing lights and marshes of half-dried liquids that wink in the low light and surprise you.
And running beneath and across all this are the soils, teeming with life and yet invisible, speaking a language that hours of talking transplantation have not taught me. And so there, at the very edge of the known world, a collaborative project of archaeology and mining, so that both the soil we excavate and that which we must leave untouched may have value, humans and machines and all the rest holed up together in a pile of hope and discovery— over there, out of the way, so only a bit of dust will get onto everything else.

something afoot.

Mothers kiss babies’ feet because they’ve never yet touched the ground.

Lovers kiss lovers’ feet because nothing could drag those feet into the dirt.

Look down; radially from your feet the world extends; 

Take care they never run out from under you.

monologue

"What's it like, long distance?"


 Long-distance? Oh just, you know...

...A vital line stretched to screaming...

With internet and Whatsapp and things...

..The scream disperses—mid-throat, mid-call, mid-Hold on, someone's calling let me check'…

And we're so rushed these days...

…I feel the agony of hours when a text isn't returned, maybe not even seen…

People keep telling us we're the couple they're pinning their hopes on (haha)…

…All our irony can't save us from expectations, theirs or our own…

But yeah, honestly, I think it's good. Gives us our space, you know?

…The spaces of texts unsent, stored as drafts, to be sent at any time...

documentary

In the old films, the heroes make exaggerated expressions—

Shaking their fists, or tap-dancing at street-corners,

While foreign, foreign voices announce the day’s news behind.

And in the old photographs, people have

Hairstyles and clothes so stagey we have to laugh.

Sometimes I think that they’re laughing with us,

It’s all a big joke, of course the screens and glossy pages 

Wasn’t how they lived really. And I can laugh freer 

Knowing that the future will cut us the same slack.

One year, Mrs Mesquita, our piano teacher, had a lucky dip for christmas.
We each stuck our hands into a box full of gift wrapped objects; mine turned out to be a silver bowl and the most expensive thing she had put in. I remember my disappointment, and Mrs M, grim prophet, telling my grandmother that I was a clever one, had an eye for the main chance &c. On the way home my sister sulked, and jeered at my half-sincere offer to swap. But by then the disapproving praise had already begun to seep in, the bowl was glinting with the passing streetlights through the crumpled green wrapping and plastic in my hands.
I worried for days afterwards about whether i'd deliberately done it; i recalled seeing a gleam through a small tear in some wrapping, and stretching out my hand towards it; —it wasn't fair—I wasn't good—if it wasn't luck. An instinct towards something shiny was not excuse enough. The bowl was primly shut away in a cupboard as soon as we got home, and everyone thumped me on the back with an assessing look in their eyes. I wished I'd got the sharpener. 

an apt regurgitation.

I need to reassure my cynicism. It wavers, sometimes.

I need to read poems about deciding to be mad[ly] in love.
About using those clichees consciously, defying
Both those who use them ignorantly, as commonplaces,
And those who studiously avoid such pollution.
And so Proclaim to the World that our love Subverts Conventional Meaning-
Ours is Language and the World that's in it!
—While believing, beneath, that it's all just hormones anyway.

I need to attend plays of socio-political Worth.
Nod vigorously in self-righteous assent, like everybody there,
Be suitably dressed, nothing too bourgeois, like everybody there,
Critique State oppression, middle class Conservatism and Indolence-
But I can never prevent those popup points:
My family's Middle Class. I don't know who the State is. I don't see
What use it is to the downtrodden that I use my leisure time
To nod vigorously at their hurt.
I need to believe that they'd stutter, ashamed, helpless, without answers.

I need to imagine those scenarios, you know the ones,
Where my friends turn out to not give a damn,
The men I love forget me, my family dies on me
[The self-absorption reaches its peak here but,
Threaded through the shit, can you see the naive trust?]
I die, and nobody cries
[Wryly smiling, viciously reminded
That I am not free of the proverbs, Chinese, Yiddish, mother's]
I need to remember, grateful for the harshness,
How little I have grown, contrary to unreasonable certainty or hope.

I need to hear of people who have done badly
Despite being born with effortless perfection;
To despair, fear though never pity,
To throw up my hands, exasperated at the futility;
I need to Believe—desperately, and grasp at the familiarity of it, 

As though I never stopped doing it, and hope
My subconscious covered those bases, to mitigate the petty calculatedness.

I need to be reduced, to be crushed and trained to cringe,
Because-—one final confession—
I cannot live in the moment, extempore,
Steadily leaving the minutes behind, like emission trails;
I am tied to each one that passes as if I gave birth to it.
I cannot easily turn my back on
Lost friend, disappointed hope, on emptiness,
Without practice.