Glaring
Playlist by Benjamin KruslingGlaring hurtles its reader deep into formal consideration’s command center, framing every punctum with queries of relation and autonomy. This text is a world where a title may hold as much as its referent, where the next work might begin inside its predecessor, where theater is stripped down to its circuitry and the charge within the performance of all language is laid bare. Benjamin Krusling’s nuanced graphical grammar is ecstatic in its quiet powers, and its scaffold of structural freedom finds tender affinity with the work’s overarching action—experimental reportage on explorations of an expansive interior landscape cracked open with softness. Throughout—heralding interiority and form—are a flickering bouquet parade of the unpaired insisting on their wholeness as is, insisting on their celebration as self. The work is ripe with fracturing’s urgency to show the ways of new wholeness, and blackness shines everywhere like slivers of light.
—Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
I CRIED THEN I WAS UNABLE TO GO FORWARD
if I’m walking in an urban situation I’m usually walking with someone
we on our own huh even if I make it early
if I’m in line any line then , a disentangled grid
equals a local battle
at the supreme north face drop for example
inside a shirt or sneaker, time circulates
you know they locked in the first 25 people in the first gate ?
and everybody else in the second gate
and beyond got a number…
you know security is out here trying new procedures every week
in an urban situation , I’m usually walking with someone and shake
I need a bite of chicken and we make a careful decision
about a hat or costly tonal shift
we don’t usually get that right
we’re not healthy so the situation dips to slow possession
can you tell us about the numbering system how it’s working
that’s not wrought that’s good
that can be hard to think through ?
I’m usually walking or waiting with someone
increasingly conscious of the barrier
an example of no flowers or shrapnel
we’re insulting the line from beside it
it’s just people that wait in line from time then from there
they give me my stuff then they eat
soon we all eat ? just thinking that doesn’t make sense
I was going forward after all I was planning
to buy an expensive shirt not co-sign the situation of the street
I did that and I didn’t then I was walking suddenly
with someone very different
to heaven , on a mule
Spurious !
( Helene Johnson
my dream of heaven was an ice cream factory , but it
echoed blackface heaven from a few minutes earlier . & all wishes ,
brained on the marvel of televised limbo where production
assistants line up lights and vanish , drag social pain into procedures
that taste great on camera . ( people ! in that sense ,
reviewing memory produces artifacts , long static renditions
of blackface ( ? heaven ? so they try to shred the Bush
years with vocal runs . it’s a room with floor to ceiling mirrors &
people spread their arms there
to sing to place the face at the center to tell the world
childhood is sweet though it tastes like power over ,
though it tastes like pistachio . these are eyes I make the
world so careful with . long static . long talk . well , you say you
want a strong feeling .
have one . or someone will think you’re withholding . ( in
your tight t-shirt . tight tight tight . in your canada goose and gloves .
it’s like fed logic . depression-fighting escapism . childhood
is so sweet , they say , as they go house to house killing on a thick
recursive loop .
& their faces drip , they’re wet with effort .
listen up
excess is advancing , this inhibition could go again , my obligations shake
off the leg like a tumble of lint . I’m a stable
cultural accident , brain blockchained to the
police
station as I walk to the co-op and back , a unit
of shook economy , a culture , tended ,
for the driftless Midwestern thought
tank . break . black moonlight break
black window .
we owe each other a yes . we will win , for we have no other option .
we want the energy of high design to lift
debris from our hearts , to call our fathers on the
phone , make them stop
this barbarous oiling . but there’s only us
here , not consolation . etc . I’m iridescent
in the university office , handing intellectual property to the
moderate secretary , salaried ,
so supportive , then a word from my heart
sweeps oxygen into me ,
then a worm in my heart , then ,
trust , attention ?
in the club one night the song I heard was only broken glass
then I knew it , I was sick , I said I’m sick , I’m up , I am
millenarian amoxicillic blues
very missing caramel : very ugly sundae , hostile
can I help you from a man in a suit at a building downtown . but ,
we’re under a similar heel .
I’m a vandal , the grid is on ice with my common
plantings . no machine can make me whole .
in the DC summer , I was devastated , that fire
brought lines to my face ( BD . and workers
in these liberal fits and patterns
on the same page of quote pragmatism . I’m a black American taxpayer
but when I woke from my dream
of jogger shopping , I was still in this world of enclosure , with
the coast in me , the climax . then I think : the police
are strong with this one . it’s drama . everything’s getting cloned .
and in the New York summer , I was devastated .
and in the Cincinnati summer
I was devastated . and in the Iowa summer
-— but not to fix it ? the zoo paid my grandma a lot
to leave her home . that old blue house
was barely even blue as it fell off the side of the road .
when you think of peace , you’re sick , my friend .
your face is lit
with the revolution’s problems .
as for me , who loves to not suffer , I’m bathed in
the brilliant lights
of attention where racist painters craft a stupid response:
the circus is returning , with bells and bombs on ,
calling on us all to carry that cold to the subway and home .