Song
I should have wrote you a better love poem, it was in me. I held it through all these nauseous waves of societal collapse. We’re losing things every day. And yet I’m here at rest in the possibility of awakening. Things end, and that is a hurt I’m trying so hard to not turn away from.
Every song is a love song, it’s obsessive— all this bellowing of demand and regrets— got me listening to this beautifully scaled vocal run because people can’t communicate correctly. I did it all wrong. Love could have been a more articulate cudgel but I chose an artlessness of immense feeling.
In the depths of you I remembered all of me that is soft and animal and wanting. Your breath which gave me breath, which gave me breath. Everything in us severed by this country stitched back together with the barest of thread.
What, if anything, can be sustained these days? Can belonging? There in time scaling, a bolder me I am still learning to inhabit. To see a person, to truly see a person, takes a willing focus— to follow a capture of air down to the bristles of the lungs
into a singular, living heart that endures all that is right and beautiful in this relentlessly cruel world.
The Wheel Is
How much of history is a man in a room
looking at a map saying, I want that. Nevermind
that a map is only an approximation of a space,
how we feed the imagination of borders, how we say
who gets to make a border. Maybe a country is nothing more
than a system of beliefs shaped by violent acts,
a creation myth that begins in death and is supplemented
with bibles
and the inhabitants of 7,641 islands suddenly find themselves
countrymen. Because someone wanted,
wanted and believed they should have. As if
we were devoid of want, ourselves. As if certain wants
are to be subsumed by other wants. The violence
of our crafting flattening over the lens of time. And so we are,
but we are in response to. That is the historic for us:
made against, moved within, moved through, in spite of,
So much of history is a document of people taking things from other people.
There are books filled with them. The great takers of the world.
Movies where the taking is reimagined, but this time
everyone has really great abs.
A map started simply enough, right? Someone sitting in a room
wanting to know “where am I”. And I feel that so much.
I want to know where I am all the time,
When my parents
looked at a map they saw that to want would mean to lose.
To have would mean to lose. That our desires
are wrapped in cost.
Once a man told me he wanted to pray for my happiness.
and wouldn’t I join him in praying for us all to be happy.
and I’m not sure why it is I don’t wish to pray
for anyone’s happiness. Happiness is passive.
I pray for your liberation. May all beings be free.
I can get happiness with a chocolate chip cookie.
I want time. I will take it. Even if it is spent and used up and written
and written over again. Even with it burdened and renamed
Even if it was made to wear different clothes, a different tongue
Even if it speaks the wrong language, even if I have to speak
the wrong language back.
I want this very history to fold back into itself. I want it to know my damn name.
a clock ain’t nothing but a series of gears. Time is a machine.
I’m pretty good at breaking machines.
Jason Bayani is the author of Locus (Omnidawn Publishing 2019, Norcal Book Award finalist) and Amulet (Write Bloody Publishing 2013). He's an MFA graduate from Saint Mary's College, a Kundiman fellow, and is the co-director of Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest multi-disciplinary Asian Pacific American arts organization in the country. His publishing credits include World Literature Today, Poem-a-day, and other publications. Jason is the recipient of the 2021 California Arts Council Established artist fellowship and was a featured artist for the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists Festival in 2022. He performs regularly around the country and debuted his solo theater show "Locus of Control" in 2016 with theatrical runs in San Francisco, New York, and Austin.