Tuesday poem #429 : David Buuck : Curfew and Far Between

 

 

Night in the city
is now owned
by the police 

the cover charge
is our obedience
til day breaks & 

real estate realism
resumes its crime-
data-mining / 

the risk-assessers
crafting riot
insurance policies 

hedge funding
the counter
revolution as 

the porch pirates
expand the gift
economy at the pot- 

latch down at the
sideshow / I watched
the helicopter feed 

the Oakland docks
lit and lit up,
surrounded by cops 

called in from the
suburbs to kettle
the protest downtown 

trick’d out donuts,
burnt trash cans
vs. burnt rubber. 

*

Inside a para-
tactical multitude
not all things
aside one another

touch — or are
touched, but perhaps
in those epic gaps
some spark alights

forged in disparate
elements, newly
charged by heat
of purpose and

forward-moving
in common fre-
quencies that
resonate through

glitch-rhythm’d
idioms across
the shattered
vocabularies

*

To under
stand space
as a given
fluidity

structured
by the eye
of the police
or landlord

thus becoming
territory —
contestable
by bodies

aligned
in negation
of that ideal
they call civic

harmony —
instead a
confluence of
disharmonic

resonance /
each shield
a mobile
placard

each placard
a shield
against the
hammer-beat

of batons
each splinter
a glitch
in time’s gap

between
the clock
and the count-
er rhythms

of revolt. Be
like water,
the sigil read,
spray painted

on the trash
bin, a barricade
made of ballot
boxes lights it up—

 

 

  

David Buuck lives in Oakland, CA. He is the co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics (tripwirejournal.com), and founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. Recent books include The Riotous Outside (Commune Editions, 2018), Noise in the Face of (Roof Books 2016), SITE CITE CITY (Futurepoem, 2015) and An Army of Lovers, co-written with Juliana Spahr (City Lights, 2013). He teaches at Mills College, where he is the chief steward of the adjunct faculty union, and at San Quentin's Prison University Program.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan