By Brecht Welch
Overcast day long slack sleeves pale in February
walking through Feldman’s Neighborhood
Tucson small adobe houses terra-cotta that one’s prune-colored
the rough potholed smell of dog shit and barking of different
sized dogs stop. Traffic signal and cast a shadow in the bike lane.
Last night when we were high upstairs I said,
“No one’s their understanding” and step
over broken trilobite shells scarlet
cement flecks brick wreckages the desert’s color alive.
Not easy to get the thoughts they don’t come out real,
a poetic imperative
and I’m asking whose voice
I give my authority
to think inside me and make real my state of truth.
A belief is something akin to
a photograph taken over a forced open window.
Of course, everything in my mind isn’t from my instinct,
“isn’t America”
that idea’s an imprecise blank of culture, think
when do I if I do will I know I’
m writing this from my disappointment, not yours.
The New York Times: Syria In Catastrophe, but I
’ve known, The First World’s selling
its immune system
to the
same customers
it tears to pieces
I’m eating an éclair.
In this café again, Café Passé, every poem
I’m interested in making I picture in Nazareth, The café
is abuzz with White people’s self-filled conversations,
their faces in pearly gypsum cell-phone lights, they speak
with the philosophy of a pop song
and their politics tenderless,
the ones capitalism calls a poet lazy with
Do any of their sentiments
have sovereignty? Do mine?
It’s my 5th Nazareth poem so I write
“I want my mind an armed revolution,”
the self tells my thoughts a map of the room,
my eyes riot and leak
a glacier
of burdened river light lengthening me
because I have always missed the world
like this:
a face leaning from off its architecture:
But it’s not that that stops me
stops myself: It’s the thought that
we believe what we tell ourselves, we
live stolen, who you would have been, taken
underground of your culture
and the thoughts
you have are not yours.