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happens to you doesn’t belong to you, only half concerns you. He is speaking of the legionnaires in Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail and you are pulled back into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze—
    The world out there insisting on this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn’t belong to you, only half concerns you. It’s not yours. Not yours only.

And still a world begins its furious erasure—
    Who do you think you are, saying I to me?
    You nothing.
    You nobody.
    You.
    A body in the world drowns in it—
    Hey you—
    All our fevered history won’t instill insight,
    won’t turn a body conscious,
    won’t make that look
    in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing
    to solve
    even as each moment is an answer.

Don’t say I if it means so little,
    holds the little forming no one.
    You are not sick, you are injured—
    you ache for the rest of life.
    How to care for the injured body,
    the kind of body that can’t hold
    the content it is living?
    And where is the safest place when that place
    must be someplace other than in the body?
    Even now your voice entangles this mouth
    whose words are here as pulse, strumming
    shut out, shut in, shut up—
    You cannot say—
    A body translates its you—
    you there, hey you
    even as it loses the location of its mouth.
    When you lay your body in the body
    entered as if skin and bone were public places,
    when you lay your body in the body
    entered as if you’re the ground you walk on,
    you know no memory should live
    in these memories
    becoming the body of you.
    You slow all existence down with your call
    detectable only as sky. The night’s yawn
    absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle
    to the sun ready already to let go of your hand.
    Wait with me
    though the waiting, wait up,
    might take until nothing whatsoever was done.

To be left, not alone, the only wish—
    to call you out, to call out you.
    Who shouted, you? You
    shouted you, you the murmur in the air, you sometimes sounding like you, you sometimes saying you,
    go nowhere,
    be no one but you first—
    Nobody notices, only you’ve known,
    you’re not sick, not crazy,
    not angry, not sad—
    It’s just this, you’re injured.

Everything shaded everything darkened everything shadowed
    is the stripped is the struck—
    is the trace
    is the aftertaste.
    I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to know whatever was done could also be done, was also done, was never done—
    The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much
    to you—



When the waitress hands your friend the card she took from you, you laugh and ask what else her privilege gets her? Oh, my perfect life, she answers. Then you both are laughing so hard, everyone in the restaurant smiles.

Closed to traffic, the previously unexpressive street fills with small bodies. One father, having let go of his child’s hand, stands on the steps of a building and watches. You can’t tell which child is his, though you follow his gaze. It seems to belong to all the children as it envelops their play. You were about to enter your building, but do not want to leave the scope of his vigilance.

July 13, 2013

A friend writes of the numbing effects of humming and it returns you to your own sigh. It’s no longer audible. You’ve grown into it. Some call it aging—an internalized liquid smoke blurring ordinary ache.
    Just this morning another, What did he say?
    Come on, get back in the car. Your partner wants to face off with a mouth and who knows what handheld objects the other vehicle carries.
    Trayvon Martin’s name sounds from the car radio a dozen times each half hour. You pull your love back into the seat because though no one seems to be chasing you, the justice system has other plans.
    Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.
    Despite the air-conditioning you pull the button back and the window slides down into its door-sleeve. A breeze touches your cheek. As something should.

What feels more