Here in the most hysteric of parallels
it could be the case that given
any inveterate Sunday some reflexive
conifer in post-territorial retrograde
had most certainly swum the basin
of my pluralistic venous system
a self-similar precognitive flight
path over the northern hemisphere
just so many moons ago until this account
of light as an acquired characteristic
became propositional in the way
every forest would come to speak to me
as a verb
I know you
as I know myself:
a fictive province
of selves
your telepathy
is so impatient
soon you’ll know that hope
is no nutrient in the last word ikidowin
on forgiveness
in any opiate moment
unlatch the skull of a lake zaaga’igan
from its trophy of red snow
we’re in this
for the killing jaaginazh fields
of every biome
our prosperity zhawendaagozi
a glimmering clusterfuck dryad
felled into the horizon
I strapped to by girlish hippocampus
in the post-enlightenment laboratories
of men I wrote of them in the hereafter
a screen test in the abattoir
of the encounter my lineage
a quack chandelier of forest bones and trash
for lack of any other occupation
within childhood but extended
a pause in an anecdote of stowaways
in the telekinetic interface of heaven
where the temperature was desperate
the clouds were mimetically charged with music
and claimed that every variegated spine
of the Americas is a kind of portent
for the glitterfist of updating to be happy
time to get on home now
for each breath has a birthright
of extinction where I cannot say
all our silence is a uterine conduit
of never tell them where you came from
Is this an indigenous or occidental dream?
note the presence of wildlife or anxiety
about money I don’t have to make sense
to pay the rent here or maybe I indulge
too much in expression I never want to
find myself anywhere I belong we all dream
all of us mammals all of us breathing all of us
exothermic and adopting a certain posture
for sleep and often I cannot sleep or I sleep
too much and I am dreaming of poetry
in a tradition not quite ablated by pox,
TB, and/or christ the dreaming self is
as corporeal in its endeavours as in
the waking state I go somewhere
and what I see is not the world
but instead my own situation
this abject territory of words
bound to me as I sever
consequence from what
I was taught to be an
exegesis or some
parable for knowing
better than to accuse
those who accuse
and also felicity,
unforgivingly
taking my birth name
wrapped in a bundle of nouns
toward the city gichi-oodena
where the air irradiated
my peach pit doggerel art
with insatiate rubble
I could vault the old sphagnum
for a credit mazina’ige card
my only limit
will be that of language anishinaabemowin
my carry-on
could be your carry-on
only I am not a corpse nibo
but a citizen