March 2025: CLIMBING THE THIRD STAIR Recently received the reminder that poetry, of course, is about rhythm. Of course, before it’s about words, about the sense of words. Sometimes, it’s the sense of meaning – just its sense and not its actuality – that should prevail. Reading T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday reminded me of that – listening to it, like standing in the points of a constructive wave, if I were to explain what that is supposed to look like, or sound like, were there no way to draw it by hand–– With a little bit of shame, I remember the things I would write, burnt into a cold, folded into that unmistakable configuration that those who leave come back bearing across their shoulders, how it irreversibly changes their gait. Scorn of no origin. It’s an attempt at describing, now, how the sun falls against each singular leaf, the sun that has oppressed and devoured us the month through, the sun that fixes yellow within each molecule, that raises the dust, that leaves the air frenzied, tired, dancing. We’d like to pick up after fifteen years. I have just the song, just the story. “Redeem the time. Redeem the dream.” - T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

April 2025: IN FLIGHT Infrequently, I catch a flock of birds together in flight. More often, I see them when they’re alone. [I wonder about their flashes of colour, and of white in particular through the shadows of trees. How rollers hide indigo inside their wings.] No other living thing––a bold claim to make––made anyway––asks to be looked at, as much. Through nature’s benevolent indifference. Through its easy disposal of affiliation, its ease with transition. Through the need, against other needs, to remain hidden. Here they come: Look at me. To be looked at, and then spectacularly, together: on, off - a prototype for flashing lights, for visibility, for performance: to be looked at through the trees, or against the sky, whether you are saying something – or not, is to speak to a certain child, somewhere, who later on will not let go of the poetry of that theory they made up when they first saw it––

COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY: EXPERIMENTS IN PATTERN MAKING

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May 2025: BISHOP’S EAR If, then:– all that’s left is to be honest, to be surreptitiously meticulous with the matter of ourselves, despite the ways this, (“who you are”) appears not to be as particulate as it truly is, not as subject to the precision of measure. It is. Only, against your own rulers, and dimensions–– Words, oftentimes, take up too much room. As they often do, shaped into the question: what would I say, if so-and-so were around, if this-and-that had happened. Not that there is nothing to say, but perhaps it – to mean the whole affair, the whole of everything that happened, the open years, and those left shut, too – was something that passed through (was only meant to pass through), like a sudden wind through the room, and it’s now left on its way. Pale, brief, unassuming. At any time, you are granted the mercy of saying it. We were exceedingly young. A blessing, and a curse, and all of time, all its uneasy maladaptation, its awkward incompetence, found us where we were then. I think the only struggle is one against time, after all. What cues would we respond to, were we to eliminate it? Light of day, darkness of night. Something else, when something’s not right. When the pressure lets up. When the spirit moves you (moves through you). When you are in flight. I’m learning that people in a choir tend to sing louder, better, by the mere fact of singing alongside someone else. I’ll take it to have something to do with the idea of flocks, later on. That even in their silence, the idea that alone today does not mean alone in time, and the choir stretches along that line, like beads on a string. Like birds in flight. Like the ones who listen still, and even if dead, transcribe and transcribe, who keep on transcribing through the night, into the early morning. “You have to match their speed, he used to say. It was the Bird Trick. [...] You have to fly next to them so they can understand you. I am not a singer-songwriter but I was in choir in junior high. The thing I liked most was how the songs made us breathe together.” – Richard Siken, Bird Trick

June 2025: CHANGE, MOVE, DEAD CLOCK This endless June [endless, endless June] of silent sacrifice beneath a neutral sky. Time has turned soft, feeble: it has dropped its score. It cannot hold these cities any longer. It cannot. [I write with the detritus of time. With the release of its precision, its dark and polluting particulate matter on the page. Like a good scientist, I am attempting to create a new measure.] Remember when, at the start, it felt possible: to want, or to have? Twenty-two, with bits of twine, with the poesis of light through a crumbling Nairobi evening. A sticky table. A fistful of coins, of cowries, of skill, colour, the cleverness that keeps the light from eight feet away, diminished, but never failing, the beautiful people you sketch through music, like notes clasped in a hand, in a throat, in sight, in smell: the ones you never knew would one day be lost to how the world rotates, spins, flings––. Now, flung: If the falsity of time, how it has stumbled, creates an indent upon the earth in which we exist, then maybe we are already there walking around the deepening furrow, careful not to fall in and find what else was abandoned: the once opulent attire of hope, buttons missing, seams torn; incomplete manuscripts, promises written on gilded notepaper, now illegible; flesh and fur and feather, long smokeless; stained stories, crossed-out, disproven tactics, bricks, crimson and concrete and coral; the fine lines, their tangles, this sordid recollection. Which, despite it all: we are all there, together. There’s a rhythm that goes against time. It can be found in – [it will be found in time]. “Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day / May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes. / Burn, glare, old sun, so long unseen, / That time may find its sound again, and cleanse / Whatever it is that a wound remembers / After the healing ends.” – Weldon Kees, Small Prayer

July 2025: THE STACCATO UNSETTLES SOMETHING IN THE NIGHT Poetry is a graph, laid against the skin of the heart, of the earth. If you look closely, the lines are passing right where you think they would. A primitive closeness remains, failing attention. Despite the vastness of time, the thought echoes through a hand’s figures, chemicals’ flames, the concrete disillusion of the city. I discuss the idea that maybe the world is stranger, less sure, than the models we define it by; or otherwise, is constantly adjusting itself against our hubris, like a secret little joke, a reminder that the one thing we should depend on is the one thing known not to make much sense, anyway. We are freer that way, in the beats between the staccato. It’s the topography of night, of pits and bumps, of honking and shrieking animals, sandy falls, marshy exits –– yet night all the same. Uniform, dense, discreet. We monitor graphs for this reason, to bring to sight certain phenomena that we might, for all purposes, have made up. We wait for aberrations, without the fear of what they mean. What’s out of place, you want to imagine, will be so only briefly. Explainable. Yet, there have been patterns which, had we paid adequate attention to, we might have understood certain things a long time ago. But repeating these mistakes, anyway, is a pattern in itself. The lesson learnt this week, like maybe what it is I’ve actually been trying to say all along, is that there is a kind of poetic need to describe things that I have learnt in watching the art and execution of a human life. To speak to what these things are, and what they aren’t, what they are trying to be. Then, to exercise it. I’ve participated in an exercise of describing what is seen in images, of describing them down to the bone. And now, I am asking myself how I might go inwards and talk about what is seen there, or otherwise, draw it out, define it. The outline has always existed, even if it shifts and undulates. Our lives are a series of images, rendered poetic by the instability of memory. What am I talking about? It is difficult to say exactly what. But I know I have been inspired by some certain things: old conversations along the upper end of Monrovia St; the feeling of watching men, ten feet tall, walk by in suits; being somewhere at the start of something; being nowhere, really; hands with knotty, slim fingers; the smell of warm spice, sweet sticky dates and butter; other people’s houses, what they hang on their walls, where they put their stuff; the romance of warm night air, of cold drinks going warm, of the awkward but well-meaning if misplaced charm of everything that I have been drawn to and especially how Nairobi, this city of my dreams and of my fears, carries it all.

August 2025: THE LONELY GRAIN OF TIME Unsure what to do with time You feel you have lived once and again Your body is here Marked with the green golden Sunday Without the time that might have Made it otherwise made it just so Light as this sharp thing knifing through Between your face and my cheek through The lonely grain of time The smallest thing – we found it – stretched to let me Within it see you lose a thought Gain another blade of light wedged in like The song’s voice relaying thin in your mind Thin closeness just a mote of time so small it might fit Right in between the mere trebles of a note Passed down from first light to first light And then to first light again––

September 2025: I RUSH INTO THAT SILENCE WITH MY BODY FIRST All of our attempts at self definition, might also be attempts against that: we don’t wish to delineate our borders so much as we wish to obliterate them, to become known to our own selves, with our own mythologies, unstuck from the world and all its repetition, its slamming routine. Arriving at that door; arriving at that door. [We are arriving at God’s door.] There is the compulsion, always, to make room for some kind of story, some kind of fantasy, a break from the cyclical world into another, more enriched, enlivened with space and opportunity. Where the things that might have happened didn’t. The things we are not allowed to do, for whichever known or unknown reasons, or the permissions we fail to give ourselves. I am thinking about being nineteen again, arriving at that door, maybe twenty, and how to account in reverse for lost time with these stories, time lost to fear and boredom, almost arriving at God’s door, time lost to the inarticulable. There was a city, once, that teemed with this virile, blood-red promise. It was as though there was a place within it, hidden, which, once I had achieved enough, would be revealed to me. Of course this place doesn’t exist. Of course it had been right in front of me the entire time. Arriving at that door. This vision was always one of steel and concrete, red and yellow city lights flashing through a tunnel, wrapped in a glittery night. Cocaine boardrooms. Green and carmine. Of pristine blue pools, hotels, of men in suits. The air, for some reason, always smells that musky, fatherly way. Someone catches a flight, stealing glances at a wristwatch. Winter is sharp, in an important-feeling way. A world made beautiful because of metal and glass, these man-made splendours. A world mad, one not yet arriving at that door. I wonder where the burden of logistics lives. How easy it is to dream in the midst of availability, capitalism’s endless reserves. I wonder where the birdsong was, then, where the trees were. It is intoxicating, I must admit, when all else – safety, acceptance, belonging – is assumed, accounted for. How it is so, would you imagine, for some such folk. It is not a unique dream. It is as manufactured as the boxy, mental memorabilia that populates it. Even fantasies are regularized, unipolar. So, now that time’s all a tangle, and Nairobi is once again revealing itself to me, I’m back, in need of an alternative ending. In it, he calls me back into the room. I was heading home. But he calls me back, shuts the door behind me. There’s a pause, heaving with something fecund, if amorphous. None of us says anything. I rush into that silence with my body first.

October 2025: LUGHA BADO MBICHI I make up where we are, fill it with a certain light A certain kind of music With the future that Very briefly Opens its eyes into this moment Where we still exist as two bodies. Bodiless, deathless as dead men. Drawing the lines down their notes, their literature and we, you know We must give them the space. Economy of noise Economy of space No wonder we are stuck. The years in their millions Have been swirling around us. The men have been there for years, perhaps a lifetime. Talking. Sending one long syllable into time, or what remains of it. Browned shadow of her wrist hanging sideways, with one hand, from a point made several years ago point faded into several years ago you go with it