from The Academics
there was one night I’ve been wanting
to tell you about and it was in June
I was woken up by a light loudest
in my time of dwindling at night
looking out for a moon but too
scared to recognize its
surveilling abnormality
it was the last time I lived in a highrise
in the US where under in the garage
a Chinese PhD student was killed
it was not the only killing neither
after I moved to Baltimore another
was shot to death on his way
to or from a sensitive normality:
the campus & its endless gates
I’ve been wanting to tell you about
the moonish violence & its anger
from all directions in me
but I will hold on to the truthfulness
of a moon’s trick first
for its intrusion is still burning
in between dreams & mists of days
mists of rising smoke in June
I woke up in a feverish loss
thinking this could be death
blue bulb in summer’s bowel
wisks now wisks now
causality appals and compels rob
rolling rolling a lingerie’s day of
stanza-ing nothing
there was another summer
I’ve been thinking about
I worked up the courage to ask
for a favor on behalf of my cohort
the then director was in that chair
looking calm and assured when I proposed
the extension of our first year’s exam
‘I’d like to think of you as my colleagues’
she chuckled or so I believed
‘not undergrads asking for less work’
for months we were chewing on this
going around asking if others knew
that she refused to give more funding
because ‘some great books r written
in prisons’ that summer I went
to plunge in a river
the riverish lights scattered on
my friend’s naked bodies
a mirror of sprinkling moon
I cried uncontrollably for a week
I’ve been wanting to tell you this
my cosmic apple-ling, soil dishes
all-automatic! these apartmenting!
thesis owns these maniac flooring
door on the margin of peels
peels peels the world’s yawn in four
weathering the drizzles’ mug
I was advised against writing
my dissertation in certain ways
to avoid political & legal risks
that I might not be ready to afford
in the later part of my ongoing
years of being in a PhD program
I started dividing sentences into
incoherent halves
poetry has other names where
my own little dirt resided
so here’s what I try to afford in lines:
controversies, slanders, & the will
to be ignorant
and here’s what’s in a poem:
sellout museums, attorneys,
zealous aunties & grannies,
contemplation over regimes
The other day I threatened my partner
to name three qualities I had
that made them love me
they were struggling but in the end said
‘u r a good lover’ I was enlightened
& demanded to kidnap my then
director and force her to say I am
a good scholar I am not a monster
obviously depending on who you ask
dine at my table of the clock will you
tickle my seconds of the run will you
mop my titles of the mall will you
compliment my suspicion of plates will you
please the skirts of wells
look water and the deeper is there I wheel you
I wheel you out of that big moo
you must not blame me for
stopping at windows with curtains
only half closed
I indulge in strangers’ interiority
& my own greedy resentment
the stares I shared with that bright
daylight nakedness hallucinated me
the same moon
I was that moon if I levitated
it is entirely possible in this poem
I have long suspected your truthfulness
even through a riot’s night fever
would you be round for me when I fall
from the voyeurist's high roof
I walked out to the grass only next morning
fear our breathing is too burdened
to write in nuances