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reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. (James Baldwin)

July 29–August 18, 2014 / Making Room
    Script for Public Fiction at Hammer Museum

On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available. And, in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No, she would rather stand all the way to Union Station.
    The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. You step quickly over the woman’s fear, a fear she shares. You let her have it.
    The man doesn’t acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn’t call it thought.
    When another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits, you glance over at the man. He is gazing out the window into what looks like darkness.
    You sit next to the man on the train, bus, in the plane, waiting room, anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within.
    You don’t speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.
    Where he goes the space follows him. If the man left his seat before Union Station you would simply be a person in a seat on the train. You would cease to struggle against the unoccupied seat when where why the space won’t lose its meaning.
    You imagine if the man spoke to you he would say, it’s okay, I’m okay, you don’t need to sit here. You don’t need to sit and you sit and look past him into the darkness the train is moving through. A tunnel.
    All the while the darkness allows you to look at him. Does he feel you looking at him? You suspect so. What does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do?
    The soft gray-green of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. You are shoulder to shoulder though standing you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair whom who? You erase that thought. And it might be too late for that.
    It might forever be too late or too early. The train moves too fast for your eyes to adjust to anything beyond the man, the window, the tiled tunnel, its slick darkness. Occasionally, a white light flickers by like a displaced sound.
    From across the aisle tracks room harbor world a woman asks a man in the rows ahead if he would mind switching seats. She wishes to sit with her daughter or son. You hear but you don’t hear. You can’t see.
    It’s then the man next to you turns to you. And as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move, you’ll tell them we are traveling as a family.

November 23, 2012 / In Memory of Jordan Russell Davis

February 15, 2014 / The Justice System

VII

Some years there exists a wanting to escape—
    you, floating above your certain ache—
    still the ache coexists.
    Call that the immanent you—
    You are you even before you
    grow into understanding you
    are not anyone, worthless,
    not worth you.
    Even as your own weight insists
    you are here, fighting off
    the weight of nonexistence.
    And still this life parts your lids, you see
    you seeing your extending hand
    as a falling wave—

I they he she we you turn
    only to discover
    the encounter
    to be alien to this place.
    Wait.
    The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.
    The opening, between you and you, occupied,
    zoned for an encounter,
    given the histories of you and you—
    And always, who is this you?
    The start of you, each day,
    a presence already—
    Hey you—

Slipping down burying the you buried within. You are everywhere and you are nowhere in the day.
    The outside comes in—
    Then you, hey you—
    Overheard in the moonlight.
    Overcome in the moonlight.
    Soon you are sitting around, publicly listening, when you hear this—what