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Poetry by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
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Copyright © 2009 by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First published by KOSOKO/PRESS paperback 2009
For more information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, e-‐mail
The text in this book is composed in Candara
Raising Leo / 10
Sitcom / 11
Hernia, 1993 / 13
Dogfight / 22
Folding the Nights / 24
boy i. / 27
Boy ii. / 28
Prophecies Before Age Six / 29
Ghosts / 34
How to Love a Butterfly / 36
About Deliverance / 37
Contents
FOREWARD
onto each page. He is a seer and protector of memory amidst a generation obsessed with finding new ways to sever distance. In
a new kind of faith:
Salvation is a myth, by way of ones and zeros and html, by way of Sunday a.m. radio This negotiation between devotion and databases becomes the crux of this collection that is in constant search of connections
tertwine the personal and industrial his dying mother becomes akin to a motherboard, his own body is broken and re-‐programmed, even the spirits return by way of machines. Our invariable need for new information and for re-‐tracing our pasts via search engines and social sites is a concept that has shaped
our global network the way one might refer to a place between heaven and hell:
so of course, I search for you there, finding nothing
In each poem there is a reaching towards something tangible and equally intangible the body and the spirit it leaves, the stroked keys and the trail of letters they somehow leave in their wake. Here, Kosoko asks the questions each body coming of age in this era of handheld computers and simulation will inevitably ask: What can technology teach us about survival? How useful is
to know? The poet here goes a step further and in sharp, lumi-‐nous ways returns to questions mankind has had since its incep-‐tion Why are we here? How do we face change? How can we con-‐quer death and its remnants? and uses technology as a vehicle for this inquiry.
through and beyond the physical world as well. One major arc is the tendency of humans to go in search of things that may be harmful and to let our inquisitiveness guide us into another kind
further by communing with those who have moved beyond the breaking, even perhaps beyond purgatory. Here, the dead are still very much a part of the land of the living; they hold memory the way a hard drive does, and the speaker longs to rid them of it. It reads, in part: I have made love to them. their memory bodies, gray and holy, are still sweaty against my skin. In the fires in my sleep, I cremate them. There is a constant pyre in this collection of searing poems where stars and systems converge. With Animal in Cyberspace, Kosoko moves deftly through past lives and present day engi-‐neering. He shifts time and space by advising us that, often times, our lives are nothing more than a hat trick: an image glimpsed and gone in a flash. Kosoko makes alchemy of lan-‐guage, using it to cross the boundaries of man and machine, automaton and apparition, all the while reminding us of what is
-‐-‐Remica L. Bingham, Author of Conversion (Lotus Press, 2007)
PART I
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Raising Leo August woman, you danced with frost-‐bitten feet. December froze you then left you for dead with your damned body too cold for its demons. Its ghosts, growling and feminine, have lion-‐heads. Their tongues thicken for the taste of blood, lips, hell-‐burnt, speaks a language black as sleep. But you, doomed lioness, are more than your vices. Your ferocious spirit stalks the night's space with an astronaut's grace. Lost in orbit. Your 36-‐year-‐old constellation had fallen too soon. Star-‐stricken with satellites using you now for On Demand digital Pay Per View. Internet like purgatory, everyone is an animal in cyberspace, so of course, I search for you there, finding nothing but foreign symbols, static, and failed network diagnostics imprisoned by television. I know you are in there, watching, and I want you to see everything, every imperfection. You, Sheba Queen mother of earth flying WIFI, you are unchannelled soundbytes riding waves, traveling the galaxy, then prowling the sun for fun.
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Sitcom God, I wanted a Cosby Show life. Ever since I could remember,
Hypnotized by the Huxtables,
-‐top fade made me love them.
Adjusting the antenna for perfect reception
parents more than weekend visits
was of the softer, quiet kind, the spoke-‐only-‐when-‐spoken-‐to kind. Had to negotiate the difference between boy things and girl things, and because I had a hard time, I pretended to like nothing. Television was neutral. It was safe. I turned ten in 1992, when Nirvana gave birth to grunge music, when Bill Clinton became president, and my surrogate family went into reruns. I watched them repeatedly, studying their features,
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their bodies for clues, for signals. Why I am not with them? Where are my closed captions? God, I wanted a Cosby Show life. But you gave me a reality series based in southwest Detroit where everyone was black and spoke thug. Raised mostly by my grandmother, she decided to bring me up eating TV dinners, fish sticks, Wonder Bread, Spam and Vienna Sausage. Addicted to television, to pork,
hair relaxers, bleaching creams that told me I was too dark, cream soda, hard candy, Coke-‐bottled glasses, plump, awkward, tube-‐child-‐boy; I remember you. I left you there trapped in a corner of a three-‐family flat, your sparks igniting, left-‐hand turning the knobs, your shadows flickering against the walls, left you there searching for a hum, a light, a piece of static, searching for anything, trying to find anything to watch.
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Hernia, 1993 i. pre-‐surgery Weak abdominal wall. Adipose tissue slips through, protrudes then falls while Grandmother sings Jesus' name in the choir. Genital on fire; I've clapped loose my ghost. But it is not holy. Embarrassed of my baby: the size of a large turd stuck in my right sac, at six I thought I was pregnant; my fake fetus dangling flank from its testicular cord. When bored, I'd squeeze the solid fluids to mush. Push then flip the hydrocele tip back beneath its lip. Hated being naked. Lopsided baggage between my legs: yolk and morphed yolk chicken eggs. At age ten, I begged to be fixed, begged to be born again like white Jesus against his crucifix.
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Blasphemous disobedience. Maybe I touched myself too much. Such by morning the pain returned throbbing. Pinched nerve, strangled then swells, dispels curved infected cells through the intestinal canal. Parasitic mud-‐clot of bad blood caught between navel and rife; the trifled-‐life must be knifed out.
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ii. herniorrhaphy Enema injected, I am prepped then shaven, pubes decapitated: a thousand fallen soldiers. The doctors won't let me eat. They've taken my clothes. Gas mask on my nose. I whisper myself this prayer, White robes make me pure. Medicated air in my lungs, intravenous drip vein-‐clipped then hung, anesthesia slips into my young fiber. Neither dead nor alive lying on this table, my life-‐line unstable: an electric halo perched over my head. Next, the surgical metal goes into my decade-‐old
biology. Incision like sex: almost sinful, almost blessed. My inconspicuous breaths: numb and slim and blind as worms squirming against the earth. A modest besiegement: army of needles and metals and flasks.
What has happened to my body? Its broken, tired anatomy whispers back, Surgeons are sinners too.
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Boy look what they've done to you. They've doped you, cut you open, taken your sick liquid in buckets that read SERIOUS WASTE. Their case evil as Medusa's. Their hair hisses and bites.
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iii. post-‐surgery Tunica vaginalis drained and removed, sex inhumed and senseless with six pieces of metal to staple sliced flesh together. The scar now, the length of my right index finger, lingers like unwanted touch. Lips nailed shut. Already I've said too much. But listen, that Boy's been washed clean off the instruments used to correct him, yet he still feels incorrect. His sterile gospels immerse in water like feet of baptismal priests-‐-‐ heads and hands full of Bible while Grandmother lies still at her burial site. The diagnostic plight? I thought the doctors fixed him, cut out his weakness, thought they sewed stronger pieces of muscle over my past. My question now How long does strong muscle last,
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Grandmother? You were supposed to last forever, the way you said your white Father had saved you. Your teeth are all that remain of you now. Funny ivory. Grandmother, they laugh at you the way that Boy laughs at me. See, how he kicks and digs through me. His knives clack and cut. When I fuck, I am trying to throw him away, let's say undo the circumcision, the cesarean section, tangle the birth-‐rope back around his neck.
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PART II
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Dogfight Animal spit mixes with mad sweat, the Rottweilers' teeth rip each other's skin: the torn patches of sin, the dangling pockets of flesh, open, then the thin trails of hot blood from cuts the color of rosebuds, the color angry petals take when they take shape, naked and burning-‐-‐ a deep, fat pain turning electric under the sun.
My first fight felt much like this: the dog of me escaped through playground gates; there were fists and kicks, a bite as I Mike-‐ Tysoned his ear.
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In that instant the ground ripped. I could hear the crowds' dumb voices, their fang-‐flung poisons shot into the humid, mid-‐day air. There, in that instant, we were schooled in the cruel truths of play, learned how to change shape, how to hate, how to take and take and take; on that ground, we boys, we, the torn down dog-‐boys built of muscle and gristle and blood-‐vessels and bone, learned how to use the powers we possessed, the power to bleed, the power to fight and feed, the power to rip open the electric body of pain and hold the live wires of its flesh, tight, to our hearts like a fresh cut bouquet.
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Folding the Nights
the nights and days, notes to be forgotten. No more letting my survival depend on memory.
The Interrogation Li-‐Young Lee
The night it happened it rained. It was fast, but slow. Something like the time it takes to conceive a thought. The sound
because it was red and wet talking about the sound red and wet and thick. This was how I realized it was not a window, but rather his own body shattering. The words held knives because I felt cuts inside the tissue beneath my ribcage.
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It went on this way for hours, days even
until finally, the pain took what it wanted, carved it out and just like that it was over, and just like that
over miles of phone-‐line and cords, had given me the news and I was without a mother and growing more motherless by the second, becoming a self-‐birthed creature, an anonymous poem, a trapped and useless Toa left out in the universe turning planets, waiting to erupt, just waiting to become comets.
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** But no. Wait. Not another death poem, not another elegy. Remember
letting my survival
** Instead, I will talk about metal, built and bent inside the thick red, wet belly of fire: over 2,500(F) degrees made to pierce deep through flesh, carve out life similar to the way the doctors carved me out: red and wet, a thick 8 pounds of life removed
that I was trapped in her tubes, tangled and useless. Almost not here, almost not telling you this: the stars I saw down there, floating in fluid like dead muscle in water, back before I was human, back when I was still part sperm, part ovum, back still breathing blood and water. Instead, I will talk about survival. Like her brother Xavier who made the choice to be broken, to be a little destroyed, and jagged down the edges. He went crazy mostly because he had to.
of dealing with its circumstance.
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One day, he packed his bags, called a taxi, and just like that he was gone, and just like that he was vanished from the earth until, all of a sudden, a telephone call and breaking through miles of cords he worked his way back into existence. I say this because it explains something about why I am waiting, why I fall asleep with the phone
into the stratosphere. Surely, if he worked his way back you can. Although I saw you down into the earth, surely you can. The doctors cut the first cord, but if the soul is the second cord that will allow you to call I will find it. Even if it causes me to erupt, even if I must have it carved out of me. Even if it burns and I am trapped in the wet, thick red belly of fire, I will find it.
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boy i. Three years old when Sitter took him into the basement. Softly, she laid him on the couch, as if on an examination table, then began to remove his trousers. Maybe she thought of it as their beauty,
her parents performing, something curious about the sounds rising from the master bedroom like widening eyelids
an accidental crack left in the doorway. What kind of innocence is this? She was twelve when it happened, when the memory she made pushed so far back in his brain that it became an imagined event, another story read, then forgotten.
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Boy ii.
Lives in the city now, rides the El to work, propels his body at enormous speeds through space. But is it safe to still call him boy, this man-‐boy with his mustache, his matured body; his coiled pubic hair, thick genitalia buttoned beneath his jeans. On the train he reads magazines, folds
his legs (always right over left.) Catches a glimpse of himself before looking at the woman sitting opposite him. She has beautiful breasts, she knows her elegance and wears confidence like a crown. He smiles. Then slowly, with his eyes, slowly begins unbuttoning her blouse.
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Prophecies Before Age Six I was born and then I died again all at the same time, thought life was some sort of punishment for an ancient crime I committed back before I knew was who I was.
the blood. The clot of cells that suddenly became my destiny. Irreconcilable prophecy. Fast forward to year 1. I am in a dark room, yes there are demons here, and angels, arguing. They both want my soul. My world is new, but I feel old. I know nothing of what will be laid down in front of me. Year 2 becomes a blur of dark circles, something like the hard flesh
malignant, the kind that turns people into stone. The doctors gave her two years to live. They stretched to fourteen. They
grip. Silently, I fed while her womb said sleep.
look boy, look at what they did. You helped them do this to me. Years 4 and 5 become one continuous Soap Opera without the theme music to prepare me for its arrival. Yes, Mother has taken off all her clothes in the streets. The neighbors watch her dance naked in the streets.
staring at the walls. She comes out the bathroom holding pills the color of rainbows in her right hand. She tells me, If I fall asleep, call the doctors.
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Listen, in my first nightmare judgment day has already
a vacant father without shame, a man without an Eve to blame.
me and the serpent, left alone in the garden. Bound at the gut
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PART III
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Ghosts i. I have made love to them. Their memory bodies, gray and holy, are still sweaty against my skin. In the fires in my sleep, I cremate them. Their ashes are text messages. I save their signals like this to keep them close, to keep them hot. I do not know why I hold their digital bodies wrapped in a frequency where every voice blurs and sounds alike.
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ii.
my lack of sexual boundaries. I trivialize the intimacy. So as to make it mean nothing I tell myself it means nothing. Channeling an old love is like raising the dead. There is an art to it. One that requires resurrection, a seduction of demons. It's time to gather the candles, the old pictures, the strands of hair, the knives. Circle them down. Séance the spirits. Tell them to deliver us, put us on speed dial. Tell them to watch as I peel back the skin. Look! while I open it, while I split every vessel apart.
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How To Love to a Butterfly for Nicole Louise Asselin Sex with insects is difficult. If you are not careful you will break her. Yes her colors are gorgeous, but know that they do shift against the sun. They are temperamental. Their behaviors are meant to seduce, to confuse a potential predator, so do not be ravenous. She is dangerous as she is beautiful. She is cold blooded, has moths for cousins who can kill you. Self-‐absorbed means she knows what she wants which is why you are so attracted. But be gentle because when she is done, she is done. She prepares for flight and once her wings break light, she will not look back.
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About Deliverance i. Lazy worship from the sofa, some Sundays I flip through holy channels. White men in three-‐piece suits telling me The end is near. Order salvation now! Media is the last religion, the gist of the tele-‐evangelists. Jesus is an enterprise, a multi-‐billion dollar industry. Prayers going as low as $20, plus shipping and handling.
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ii. Salvation is a myth, by way of ones and zeros and html, by way of Sunday a.m. radio and wireless signals invading my mobile phone. Two thousand years post-‐resurrection and men have learned noting about redemption? Temptation is a bitch, a wild cyber-‐Rottweiler in heat.
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iii. In the absence of love we do many things. We make mistakes with our bodies. We steer so unapologetically to touch that we veer off course. Lust finds us, clawed and undone, still cuddling the sheets, relentlessly sniffing for the last scent of their sex. What I know is that our only duty on earth is to be human, to strive for conventional things: a home, a faith, a body that is not your own to call your own.
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