I

As I said, I’m a lawyer. Technically speaking,

is a head blown to pieces by a smart bomb a beheading?

                                II

Infinitely compressible, yet expandable time,

and curved space, in the preface to Lucretius’s

first book of De Rerum Natura is a tribute to Venus,

in the last book a description of the plague.

                                III

Estimated one to two thousand militia, gangs,

really, of fifteen to three thousand

armed killers, in separate, overlapping

networks, difficult to differentiate, and now this,

to quote an anonymous State Department source,

what no one could have predicted, this phenomenon’s,

the caliphate’s, rise, nothing since the triumph

of the Vandals in Roman North Africa

this sudden, this incomprehensible.

                                IV

In the technocapital sphere

absolute principles of profit growth,

of value accumulation, the absolute freedom

to recombine the production of raw materials

into virtual information

in spaces of time, info-time.  

                                V

A theological-political fragment,

a mythographical, scriptural, text,

and sorrow, to understand the meaning

of sorrow, Saint Sorrow,

the addressee of my avowal,

Saint Sorrow’s stern vigil necessary to keep.

                               VI

Hyperviolence is the word, of epic proportions,

a species thing, the point at which

violence turns into ontology,

these endless ambitious experiments of destruction,

a species grief.

                               VII

Quite often, almost daily,

in fact, I have strong impressions of eternity,

my ancestors are there, too,

in the shadows—my mother, my father,

grandmothers, grandfathers, whom I refuse

to let perish—whispering to me to be careful.

                               VIII

What’s that about? Someone I heard say

that to say that Hispanics are East Asian

is sort of like saying that Arabs are white.

                               IX

Hear that, that man’s face being stepped on,

skull being cracked by the baton stick, head

slammed against the concrete edge, blood

in his eyes, body limp, in the process now

of being handcuffed.

                               X

I am speaking of a law, now, understand,

that point at which bodies locked in cages

turn into ontology, the point at which

structures of cruelty, force, war,

turn into ontology. The analog

is what I believe in, the reconstruction

of the phenomenology of perception

not according to a machine,

more, now, for the imagination to affix to

than ever before.