How to get by

"In the archive of dreams / where lost words go..."

In the archive of dreams
where the lost words go
an inverted comma leaps
down an Agnes Martin grid
it’s perfect blue, but what’s done

is perfection. The dictionary
concise, and one man’s name
on the cover. How absurd!
Hot magenta zines folded
on William Blake and pages
from a pdf of Sister Outsider

(you know which), but the plates
were too small and I couldn’t
read the prophecy. The walls
say rectilinearity as a characteristic
of my human habitat, but

everything’s sliding down the hill
in short order, geologically speaking.
I was as fractious as any of us
squabblers and strivers. A consensus
formed, as if geologically—we stopped

saying community, started saying neighborhood
until that cell, too, is emptied of its honey.
We were lessees, brittle roots, easy to extract
but in other ways tenacious clingers to vitality,

ascenders and descenders of the divine
alphabetic ladder, fingers threaded through
the mane of the Buraq. How to be both
ultra soft and a tool, a weapon, to slip

the word outlaw into my renaming song.
How to swivel the pink stapler, stack bread
in the box, recommend you to the saints and
angels, the divine antecedents, and humble

holies who go around dizzy and broke, eating air,
untouchable by misery, issuing their foolish blessings.