Nature Poem Read online

  Let’s say I’m coiled by the part in the Al Green song “Love & Happiness” after the toe-tap beginning when the guitar twang lifts a musk of mmmmgh into the air

  Let’s say you’re talking to me when this happens and yr feelings bruise but I literally can’t

  hear you

  and in fact I no, no my finger to yr face when you

  or that drop in “Mine” by Beyoncé where she says “no rest in the kingdom”

  (note to self: write pop song called “Once, Twice, Three Times Beyoncé”)

  the shreds of Al’s voice Bey’s deep gauze stuffed deep in my like chakras

  I have the vague feeling in the thoroughfare of my thought process

  like I care what yr saying ghostly

  recognition of the fact that yr getting insulted, but srsly? Give me

  a minute.

  This absence of reason—but a flood that feels reasonable to me—is this I wonder is this, natural?

  or does music turn me into a sociopath?

  My roommate Danny says music makes you gay, but only some ppl realize this is happening.

  Let’s say I want to get a nose piercing.

  Let’s say I’m 30 years old.

  Let’s say nothing big and bull-like, nothing too attractive, nothing chandeliering from septum to lobe. Just a simple, little stud nothing more.

  Is it normal to get a nose ring at 30?

  Normal is defined not by what it is, but what surrounds it. Meaning it could literally be anything, and is nothing.

  Is it normal to get a nose ring at 30?

  No, it’s not.

  Am I just afraid of death?

  Yes, probably.

  Is there nothing more normal than fearing death?

  It is very natural to fear death.

  Should I get a nose ring?

  It would look very cute on you.

  My family’s experience isn’t fodder

  for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs

  But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?

  Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game

  Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil

  Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company

  and I am descended from a long line of wildfires

  I mean tribal leaders

  The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off

  I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?

  The sadness is systematic. Suspicion is the lesson that sticks. I forget

  When Pio was young, he tended sheep. The flock numbered a couple thousand strong, and he herded them across the four corners of San Diego County

  Drought makes us restless, searching for nourishing territory

  Ventura kept horses. He used them to ferry NDN ppl across the county’s mountain trails, like the first reservation taxi driver. You cd say that, like his father, Ventura had a flock. They both went on to become chiefs

  Sometime much later comes me

  I scout from the peak

  of our sacred mountain

  I’m dragged to the center

  of town in chains

  I’m old women scattered

  along the creek

  my little hands squeeze

  my little mouth shut

  drawn into nooks

  within the valley

  like a sharp breath

  while shaggy men on horseback

  following the water

  seek brown bodies

  for target practice strong

  brown backs for breaking

  in the name of the church

  Valle de las Viejas

  blue echoes split

  the early evening They spit

  and ride on

  but I keep my breath in

  Cahuillas and Kumeyaays often banded together in the borderlands of Northern San Diego, esp post-contact. The name “Pablo” crosses both sides of our tribal lineages like a stitch. I’ve read they’re very good at peon, a game of predicting the banded patterns of black & white painted bones

  Somehow other ppl know all the rules

  of dating—Def do NOT send him that txt, Jess says

  I wish more of my young self was free to learn abt flirting

  and the Whitney Museum and the Shirelles

  instead of which halls not to walk down for fear of getting my faggot ass beat or what to do when yr cousin high on crystal points a gun at you

  but here we are at the cap of this party, sitting across a kitchen table getting hot drinking from the bottle. Yr the ghost of horror. I mean gust. I mean boner. I mean I’m new

  at likin you. Generally.

  You move. My move. Your move. My move.

  I forget

  the issue was citizenship. William Pablo became a figurehead of NDN resistance in the north: do our tribes remain independent—isolated on small reservations in the foothills and mountains—or descend to the city and assimilate into the general population?

  The “You” consumes so sweetly

  We forget the game ends.

  People r so concerned abt “the Earth”

  in the sense of kale salad and bruised

  gin

  She’ll be just fine. We might not make it, hopefully. We’ll exhaust ourselves soon what with global population blooms and San

  Loco macho nachos and ruddy from frozen margaritas you reach for my arm. You drifted off again. You ask, What are you thinking about?

  What the hell happened to INOJ

  What are you all on, Radiolab is so fucking boring and white

  noise That naked emperor

  We’re chemists, but it’s not a science. Science is pretty racist, but inventions reflect their creators

  keep living

  keep living

  keep living

  there was an orchard in the valley. Sand Creek was shrinking. This is all very blurry to me. Candelaria gathered wild food from the hills and woods. She tamed the intrusion of Spanish crafts, made pinole—a blend of native seeds and Spanish barley. She churned butter and made lace. She ground acorn in ancient metates and wove baskets from dry grasses

  We’re at San Loco bc that’s what I wrote

  I was just thinkin The Last Supper says way more abt Da Vinci than it does abt the good book, you know? There’s no likeness for the apostles—those were just men about his life or something. Who is Jesus in the painting but the painter? Or is he the Judas?

  Just kidding I never think.

  James looks at me like I’m not speaking English. I believe in facts, he says. He says, you talk like you’re always being interrupted by yourself. He says, you always take big breaths before you speak, like an excited child.

  Gulp.

  What is a fact even?

  James rolls his eyes. What do you mean what’s a fact? A fact is a fact. Facts are real. Proven. Objective.

  like restaurants in a changing neighborhood

  a straight guy saying “size queen”

  white gay saying “GO OFF”

  Kelly Clarkson singin w/ En Vogue that part in “Free Your Mind,” oh lord forgive me for havin straight hair, it doesn’t mean there’s another blood in my heir

  Don’t get me wrong—I literally love Kelly Clarkson. Things reflect their intersections.

  I say Facts are fallacies, created and curated by authority figures w/agendas and I say, Facts are used to subjugate, intimidate, enslave, and kill entire “races” of ppl reproductive rights etc I say, so yeah I have a complicated relationship with facts and pretty much everything. The only thing objective abt facts is yr blind allegiance to them. James.

  or, I say nothing cos I’m tryin to get lucky.

  I can�
��t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my tribe’s erasure—why shd I give a fuck abt “poetry”? It’s a container

  for words like whilst and hither and tamp. It conducts something of permanent and universal interest. Poems take something like an apple, turn it into the skin, the seeds, and the core. They talk abt gravity, abt Adam, and Snow White and the stem of knowledge.

  To me? Apple is a NDN drag queen who dresses like a milkmaid and sings “Half-Breed” by Cher

  I wd give a wedgie to a sacred mountain and gladly piss on the grass of the park of poetic form

  while no one’s lookin

  I wd stroll into the china shop of grammar and shout LET’S TRASH THIS DUMP then gingerly slip out

  and unrelated, once I called a cab to take me thru the drive-thru @ White Castle after the dining room closed

  I sob

  at a Tim Dlugos that Roy is reading me at the vegan diner on the formerly Italian side of Grand Street. This is OUR medium, he says.

  My grandmother dreamed of Tin Pan Alley and wrote a song once with the chorus “Your kisses drop like atom bombs”

  Get in, loser—we’re touring landscapes of the interior. In the mist

  of words: the plume the matter the radiant energy

  feeble defective inferior imbecility pure deviant

  American mixed basic standard data crazy facts

  moron intelligent classic good unfit fit sane

  masc

  open chill smooth fun educated artsy well-

  traveled laid back cool quirky quality

  toned agenda-free gifted nice professional athletic

  secure facts down-to-earth mild-to-wild that

  spark the x-factor my truth flesh tone support our troops she’s

  crazy that’s amazing natural normal perfect

  you know what I mean?

  I have chosen—you have chosen—he or she had chosen—we have chosen—they have chosen

  whose origin word, cēosan, meant something more like to taste or to try, “only remotely related to choice”

  an illusion of capitalism, like control

  Ppl often look unfazed by Kenyan university massacres and the onslaught of James Franco. Behavior is mutable. Mirrors love attention.

  Like everyone,

  I read a Choose Yr Own Adventure w/my fingers keepin tabs on various forks in the text, to backtrack when reachin a dead end

  How often do you choose hunger, or cheese burger? A space in btwn is hard to see when you’re all borderlands—

  We’re on the rooftop of the Wythe Hotel. It suggests exposure. It shoots up like teeth, the cool breeze sobering like a newly sober ex

  turning softly into peaches from the light behind the bottles

  He cups my neck (you hate all his friends) The hairs on his face like an English garden (his sister’s a racist) Taller than I remembered (he played you like a dolly then tossed you aside c’mon TEEBS)

  carrying

  the past in oneself, like a word

  Language is engineered so naturally it’s like it doesn’t even happen

  a shifty pigeon

  eyes my sub sandwich

  adaptive as progress, the grey city—it fevers me.

  Language tells the story of its conquests, its champions, its admixtures, while moving onward into new vessels: Lupin the cat waddles to his water bowl.

  Language often fails me, the static cling of an unknown word and the urge to be heard

  but also

  the full freakin phrases that are somehow a dry barrier to others like, black lives matter, or rape culture, or “spirit animal” suggests indigenous religion and spirituality is ridiculous

  Linguists say a language is dead when its only speakers are adult, that in a hundred years 90% of the worlds languages will be kaput

  A melody.

  A lyric.

  A cave.

  A blue orbit suggested by echoes.

  lol the word of the day on dictionary.com is diddle.

  I will always be alone.

  Here is a short, peaceful, pastoral lyric:

  Crappy water

  Shoots thru purgatory creek

  On its way to the Colorado River

  My bad, says the EPA after accidentally dumping 3 million gallons of waste in the stream.

  Fuck you too, says Nature.

  Onstage I’m a mess

  of tremor and sweat

  I must have some face-blindness? bc I can’t tell the difference btwn the faces

  of attention and danger

  The gift of panic is clarity—repeat the known quantities:

  Today is Wednesday.

  Wednesday is a turkey burger.

  My throat is full of survivors.

  Science says trauma cd be passed down, molecular scar tissue, DNA cavorting w/war and escape routes and yr dad’s bad dad

  I’ve inherited this idea to disappear

  Oh but you’re a natural performer

  In the mid 1800s, California wd pay $5 for the head of an NDN and 25¢ per scalp—man, woman, or child. The state was reimbursed by the feds

  When yr descended from a clever self adept at evading an occupying force, when contact meant another swath of sick cousins, another cosmology snuffed, another stolen sister

  and the water and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood

  u flush under the hot lights

  I can’t write a nature poem bc that conversation happens in the Hall of South American Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History

  btwn two white ladies in buttery shawls as they pass a display case of “traditional” garb from one tribe or another it doesn’t really matter to anyone

  and that word Natural in Natural History hangs

  also History

  also Peoples

  hangs as in frames

  it’s horrible how their culture was destroyed

  as if in some reckless storm

  but thank god we were able to save some of these artifacts—history is so important. Will you look at this metalwork? I could cry—

  Look, I’m sure you really do just want to wear those dream catcher earrings. They’re beautiful. I’m sure you don’t mean any harm, I’m sure you don’t really think abt us at all. I’m sure you don’t understand the concept of off-limits. But what if by not wearing a headdress in yr music video or changing yr damn mascot and perhaps adding .05% of personal annoyance to yr life for the twenty minutes it lasts, the 103 young ppl who tried to kill themselves on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation over the past four months wanted to live 50% more

  I don’t want to be seen, generally, I’m a natural introvert, n I def don’t want to be seen by white ladies in buttery shawls,

  but I will literally die if I don’t scream

  An NDN poem must reference alcoholism, like

  I started drinking again after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston

  I felt so underwater it made no sense to keep dry

  In my poem, I cdn’t get out of bed for two days after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston

  me n sweatpants n a new york slice

  I feel dry as California

  where I somehow managed to thrive in a climate of drought for thousands of years w/o draining the state, yet somehow we were primitive?

  Consequence shapes behavior. So does the absence of consequences.

  America says some ppl are raised guilty. Some are innocent of everything. Some ppl will always have to be good sports remain calm

  Remain Calm

  Remain Calm

  Who even wants to go into space? I fucking hate traveling

  I’m a weirdo NDN faggot and frankly that limits my prospects

  plus it sucks—watching the couples and the string lights

  slow-dance in Monbijoupark, to realize

  despite history

  my own abrupt American body

  America that green ghost, been af
ter me for at least a couple hundred years somehow once convinced me to do its dirty work for it sharp in a warm bath

  Sun breaks upon the Pacific Northwest. Is this a nature poem again