poetic dialog b/w me and RMK: "August"

in response to "Lineage for Mika"



look up i say: look
in the dirt my eyes are as
diamonds in a deep cave with no light
and i am my best and only friend.
will you be there for me? when
i dis-integrate, will you be laughing at the law
of entropy. can this room grow to fit
many rooms? all rooms? because as
deep as i dig no ancestral mouths
emerge to fill my blood with music

that only happens when i step onto the
streets of Kochi in late summer, the
through-ways of the old arcade
shaking with the rattle of naruko
(clapping like fleshless hands) and
jumping with the stomp of sole-based beats.
my mouth fills with the wind of this
island moving me to the ocean
where i turtle up and down the beach, dragging
me and my long shadows along the shores
because i yosakoi - only come around at night.
I’ve never been to Hiroshima,
but I am Nagasaki on a white hot august day.
i am comfortable blinking stars
away but it kills me to drag my body,
growing heavier and more worried,
back into the water, thick with spirits.
back into the pull and pull of the tides,

into the flashing lights rising from
the cities, into the gentrifying
neighborhoods and the forested suburbs
back into the bogs that hatch
fireflies and blood-sucking insects,
where first Native blood rebelled and bled,
and later African blood rebelled and ran red
and eventually dried in the branches as the bodies
swung low, below the Mason-Dixon line.

so i say look! and let the heat sear out
your body through the cornea.
can i collect family the way
bones collect dust in a museum? if
i move, will you fall off? if i settle,
will the room get smaller?
will you be there? (as you say, the dead
will not) and if so, where
will i be? my need is for a land to reach up
from the hills and grab my ankles
tell me that i won't float away. say:
"i got you."