“CODES IN FLIGHT: A SYMPHONIC TAKE”
I.
I read through the vagrancy laws, the codes
manifest a thousand villains in Mississippi, the Delta, North, through Chicago, Boston, to the sky.
I was a part of the swan song of codes that only translated in court to hearing abolitionism.
Multisyllabic things. Not the codes. But instead, a mess and as a mess, they used code,
And switched. Yes, by the missive, from town squares in North Carolina,
To buying fruits on Sundays, to lumbering away, and messing with burial practices:
From coded language to vending to Indian brethren, to disorder in the streets, in New Hampshire
It is dusk, and run, the regulating restraining changed conduct, gave another mission, to split
Families in a patchwork of coded piece, to assess census data, to encode meaning
To stop the salted air from legislating against coded conspiracy, originless: there is a code for codes.
II.
This familiar invasion, Mexican bees, Mexican flies, China disease, surveys, surveils, codes
Youth against the young; codes to reward immobility. Tic-tic, legislates down insurrection.
Walled street invasions, the thickets duped the masses, moving inches at night, amorous blackbirds
Flitted on the moneyed ports that coded taxes, pound-for-pound weighed flesh by flesh of cargo.
Codes barnacled up North from sugar plantations, from Haiti, from the Caribbean
To coded cities, to the back of trucks that coyote-mask the movement of real-estate developments.
There is a nameless honking, on the New Mexican border is code for a chorus—
Of unnamed regulations whose sole purpose is the labor contract; the Ship distorts in the twilight:
Crack-by-crack with the restraint of a thousand new codes, the nation undergirds
The fragrant and authentic soil of new coded symbolism that threatens the whole.
III.
A code from the scholared bespectacled translator: there is a runaway language in the liminal lands
It stalks, it hides, it has not yet had its tongued insurrection, like a thousand rock doves, transplanted
It coos coos code in the eves of corporations, in moss-covered foundations,
By bridge bases, on platforms of all buildings, coding streaks in the concrete for later generations:
To be able to use, to read; marginalized in Trenton, NJ, on the musky waters
Not hidden anymore in the patronizing sunlight on every eve, every moment, every monument.
The codes have prepared to take flight, and their landscape is
The world that is no longer their guarded thicket, but a canon-burst of organized tails of code in sky.
“CONFISCATION – ECOSYSTEM”
On Seneca Village—19th century settlement of mostly African American landowners in NYC which was confiscated to construct Central Park
In Seneca Village, there is a dredged ecosystem, the remaining solidarity of ferns
From imagined communities, a league of constitutions and every constitution legalized
The frontier of the dredged ecosystem: ordered that a Declaration be made;
That all things being equal, the steal that was to be erected in the utopia
Held its breath, in a deep breath and confiscated the last of the quail eggs, and jackrabbits.
Tore out the first home, for a sanitized ecosystem and financial repayment by pastoral
Beauty – this honorable gardening and imitation behold the Wilderness of the urban Forest
Which mimed truancy, the indelicate struggles of poverty, and the internal vines
That feathered the roads that blamed truancy for a circular economy stem.
Flowers to your granddad and grandma are intercepted and beauty is repayment, and that
Such pious men and women should live in harmony at the unveiling of confiscation
At the repatriation of business by poets who have broken no treaties, and whose lives droop.
Themselves they declare and erect an evacuation zone with charts, along the Elm and Oak,
And look for two or three paths back into the justice zone. There is a light in the treatment
Of the squirrels who bemoan business as usual and steal food from Danish tourists, and the
Sheen of the lake smells of lack of treatment, and the eminence of the domain was a language
Imposed on the scoop of backs of families, and the calls in the woods at night, the owls
Are the sounds of Zion Church screaming the hymnals of un-dried tongues and the repayment
Songs that awakened the woods and shook the leaves off the trees and repatriated the darkness.
“THE BRUSHFOOT OF WEST VIRGINIA”
Ode to Blind Willie Johnson
The Brushfoot West of West
Virginia:
You can hear it strum dangling-sway,
the brushfoots gather west of west
Virginia, maple blossom in the streets.
A twang-slide bound brush
steel guitared, authentic
og galaxies mating in grandiose orgies,
on a snowy willows mulling:
what vegetable matter, wings[1] sink
with other prostrates, sequence,
(a ventriloquism)
ecstatic as the un-grief, witness
raised, blue plank to body not
in carceral state but transmogrification
transmutation, in alchemical tips
of azure-purple mountains, radial
from state labs named forests of walnut
trees, constellations of Andromeda, Nereid, rise
(ventriloquism)
Above the barren land, in the un-sacred
fringed cartography, I charted
spicebush-to-spicebush, patrolled, beaten,
found wings beaten planked effigy, West
of Broome County. This archaeology
a burned secret tic-tac-toe in the county
map, dotted with potholes, insoluble
hubrid puffs like sulphurs, corroding
below the water basin of the wormy
table, brush-footed wood nymph
& in this position in the green inched
community; a citizen of leaves
cupped the clamor
eclipsed by yet another wet season.
[1]The brushfoot is a lesser fritillary, a species of butterfly with frosted outer hindwings, surviving and expanding its range, while the climate changes, moving north. And disappearing in other rural areas.