A site for poetry, for ways of thinking and writing that are impossible to consolidate with a political or conceptual vocabulary.
Mask Staff are everywhere and nowhere.
The Grapevine Telegraph by Jocine Velasco
Out Here Tonite and Living Will
OUT HERE TONIGHT (Techno Tropicalia)
Bursting protea and waxy monstera
Stand in a bouquet box in front of mixers tonite
Glowing tubes hang off the white wall,
Silhouetting my shadow friends
Shaved hooligans with hoover sounds
To the beat of fuck! twelve! for! life!
It’s about praxis and that means drugs and dancing
Power Play starts late at the Y and no one
Wants to think about fungibility at this hour
DJs wait for overpriced pizza and the acid
To hit them like a chemical flood light
The prima linea convulses, jacked with intent,
As the illegal alien on Rustruct’s white tee raves
The rich may never have owned taste
Yet we still stole that back from them
My girl hands me hits of this and giggles,
“I have to look at you too!” about the schlubby
Black bloc-ers that don’t the about the big A
As in, Aesthetics. As in, she looks like the statue
Of Nike? To look good for her, like, literal survival?
I ride her vibe and skipp around my thoughts
C. is on the roof donned in black linen,
Like a godhead floating in a nightlake,
Speaking of Fumiko Kaneko’s life
I am bracing my eclipsing body, coming down
The stairs as my friends’ faces holograph into
Wet-green foliage with sunburst
Orange red berries for eyes, a mask
impenetrable to surveillance
I left
I left pieces of my haunches there
For my panthers to feed on
Living Will
This is my last radical act:
Live through my friends dying,
A spent sow with deflated tit
Working a tool with cracked fingertips
Wake early to wash
Their dead bodies and carry them back
Listen to their last gasp, their final
Complaint about losing sight of the struggle,
Write their last rent checks, tell the news
To their children, comfort their parents
And come home to water the crops at dusk
Listen to their lovers fight about
Their recently acquired financial and
Emotional debts while I preserve my
Comrade’s bodies with plant oils and latex
Wail the prayer chants with the mob
While I start the funeral pyre on a dry and
Open clearing in the woods
Read and proofread such-and-such
Theorist’s commemoration, pick up the
Group of hitchhiking artists, laugh real
Laughter, cry real tears, shine real
Guns and drink water to sober up
Unsexed and unseen, I would very much
Like to sit down and stare at the sea
I pace my gait and look ahead
Jocine Velasco When I was moving to America as a child, my family and I had to strip naked and bend down in front of a state agent at the embassy in the Philippines as part of a standard immigration screening procedure. I moved to the Southeast in 1996 during the summer Olympics. Before that, my family burned our trash down a slope behind our backyard in the Philippines. I write poetry about the totality of the institution and the solace of our armed joy.
