Holy Ghost People

Note: “Holy Ghost People” includes quotes and corruptions of the following voices: Charles Olson, James Brown, Myung Mi Kim, Ernestine Van Duvall, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Juanita Lumpkin, Charles Wright, Cornelia Parker, Samuel Beckett, Louise Nevelson, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Old and New Testament.

1

Make the body speak or say,

make it

break.

This is where I live, where

I am told—

“tear me away.”

Selfsame, this scattering, a body

annulled throughout.

This berefting—

if one suffer, all suffer—

A part and apart, continuing

and canceling as you move along,

a kingdom laid to waste, encouraging

its own plunder and rape.

All this ambivalence, the body is.

People shout, words break, those gangsters

in whose anger arousing

I am a mouth.

2

Refuse to say, then
say it.

My body stirred, stricken—

if one suffer, all suffer—

Again, the reminder. As if here,

on the dirt floor, enraptured,

the two of us weren’t already—

for the body is not one, but many—

Dear thugs,

the body is innocent or

professes to be so

without blame. It never

hurt you, never

burdened your tongue

with more than it could not

(hauling itself up, making

itself, forcing itself to)

say.

3

Each thing I say I unsay,

over and over,

and in circles—

“How many times

have I made it here?

How many times will I

make it back?”

This faltering, the life

it concedes,

liminal, unconstrained,

always somewhere else.

Smoketrees line the road, the road

hidden but for the trees.

Among them a judgment,

a reckoning—

come through the self-sieve,

bear me up—

To summon

submissiveness.

To be so easily passed through.

4

And now the voice,

and now the body.

One enters the other,

othering—

“I resurrect things that have been

killed off.”

Where are we?

Behind, behind, the limping

rhythm of my heart, your voice

calling from such a distance as

the body is. Borrowed

for such an exchange—

“If I’m already dead, how can I live?”—

You have been seen.

You are known.

You will be paid.

5

Our bodies are not hidden
but revealed

precisely for what they are—

“He came back, never said a voice,

dead man”—

Permanence is without muscle,

that throstle song—

dividing into everything severally as it will—

Owning nothing,

owing no one,

self gives way, your voice

in my throatgut,

what burgeons, bludgeons. A gift

either perfect or monstrous—

“what people call by the word

‘scavenger’ is really a resurrection.”

Owning nothing, owing

no one.

6

Out of what has ceased into
what is ceasing.

Nobody’s voice, again. Such slippage.

How you find your way in.

And in and in—

“I just blown here, I just come here,

and this is my home”—

Supporting the whole weight

of your weightlessness,

the body of what I never was but have

now become, emerges—

chrysalis, supple husk,

(o use your gentle hands)

stripped now to my bare
places.

7

What was left and leaving
gave itself over

to what would come. That moment

when your voice sounds so very close

to the sound of what happens

or is happening.

What is happening?

Close by, a conversation—

“But why don’t you let yourself

die?” “I have thought about it.”

“But you don’t do it.”

And round it, farther and farther,

dusk, this gloaming,

a seclusion that forbids any entrance

or departure, a distance

like that between

being freed

and freeing someone.

8

To rid itself, to rid
myself,

grant me clemency. To refute, to refuse.

As unable as I am.

So many thresholds, so much

veiling. I can never know

what I want to know.

There is no deep enough, no

end enough—

speak without words such words

as none can tell—

Tonight looks like Jerusalem—

“I’ma save my breath in case I have to
run from here.”