how we got our blues-tongue

& the augurs among us direct our gaze to the sky all alluvial

breaking through, breaking blue & we open our mouths to

catch the cerulean, catch the rugged blues again on our tongue, blurred & bruised

decadent deluge of dirge drenching skin, dandelions, & dirt. diviners say we dancing dizzy to the

ends of the world, dancing at the end of the world. to elsewhere. edging to

flight. let there be flight. & there flight be. we be a many-forked-tongue folk,

glossolalia-gurgling, crossing-&-translating-other-realms folk. apocalyptic glitch, we put our

hands on our hips, then put our hands in the air, hold our hands to the haints & catch their

iridescent feathers. oh haints, come true to us, come blue to us, come through to this

juke joint we call earth, this jagged jollification. we won’t jilt you. no, we

keep our dead kin with us as the dead kin have kept us the living.

listen, they can’t catch us, but they can catch these hands, these

moonfire spells to undo & redo, this fractalwinged explosion of this world, this

newness, this emergence—that isn’t actually that new at all. if we telling the truth about our

origins, this is quite old. blues old, which is bones old, which is dirt old. oh, yes we’ve got our

poems, parables, psalms, & our own palms as record that we’ve refashioned ourselves before, we’ve

questioned ourselves before. quivered with loss before. made portal of crisis & quantum-leap

rebirthed. bled & tended flesh wounds with rest & stinging medicine before because the material

without the spiritual & psychic does not a dialectic make. let’s get the rhythm of our feet, let’s get

the rhythm of our throats, holding a cosmic alchemy of tragedy & celebration that can turn this

thing upside down so that the sky becomes soil & soil becomes sky & dirt is what we seek for

salvation. verily, verily, when you get this rhythm, meet us at the crossroads. you’ll know because

you’ll hear whistling from the mulberry trees. you’ll smell them, too. & we’ll be there, perched. 

looking real xenial & otherworldly. we’ll be humming with the haints, conspiring about

going up yonder. going up yonder to be with our motherworld.

zoom zoom. we’d like to fly away. fly away to right here.