brown critique

The Atlas map book
Says nothing about our lands and forest rights,
The exploitation of the poor by the rich,
The loss of our traditions and culture,
Disease, hunger and death:

In memoriam of those who perished on 4 June 1989 on Tiananmen Square. An accidental cross-examination with the Chinese exile author Ma Jian, who dares to remember China’s past in his novel “Beijing Coma.”

everything is in the words

like twisting the night into spools of time. sometimes I am quiet like the made bed, waiting for the weight of arms and legs and backs, and at others I am the dinner tray, wine and clams and reluctant poinsettias, set for dining. but all the while the television set threatens to burst into life.

He laughs at the sight of the food: “All this is for me!
Have a cookie. No? Why!
Are you sure? Have you eaten?
I’m sorry there’s nothing to eat.
I’ve been working all day long,
Writing a little,

Untying the text I find
Laconic hieroglyphs of hysteria
Always already imbricated
In the lines and bylines
Of power/knowledge.
Fumbling for Foucault
I fall into the furnace
Of discourse from which
The Delphic doodles
Of Derrida rescue me:

I shook the door a little but the metallic grating made my teeth wince. The 19th century colonial powers raised in the outskirts of the cities’ massive prisons with the same care and thoroughness they built their governors’ mansions. In their days too, the Hastings prison had a record of escape twice a week.

We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
by the gate of the Villa of Peace,
our hands blossoming into fists
till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we’ll enter
our last world, the first that vanished

When the day is over,
let it go.
Don’t try and stay awake
to get some more work done.
Flow into the night.