2 Codex

By | 12 March 2021

Codex 9

00.21 (START TAPE)! We begin here in transit, it is September
and I am inventing a kind of time the way Coltrane did
in Alabama. I am looking for a hole in the ground or lightning
from a skinned tree with its fragile brightness, that spikes
below the waterline, not to be seen from the dirt road.
Where is my city perched on seven hills? Where is the sky
in its height to watch the evening crawl in? Where are
the horses that broke loose? I know I come from another
world that is both sheath and blade, both bruise and blood.
You have me in a room. Your boss is using my last name
outside this door to express the relationship between me
in part and it’s whole. The word sounds strange at the edge
of his mouth, like bait at the end of a hook. I glance at a clock.
The ceiling tiles are perforated, and you ask Why did I move
from the home I once had to this home? Your silence is also
a hole. The soil from which I came does not want my return.
Men who look like me in the eighth century came to the hem
of your shores. They used the wind like a stone in a sling.
I used an airbridge. I used a runway. I used a loud flight path.
I used an airport lounge of a country known for its invading
army. I used who I am in this night with its far-off star. I used
what nobody would admit, that geography is everything. (END TAPE)

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