Cal Bedient - Days of Unwilling

A friend of mine sent this poem to me the other day. I like tremendously.


ALISON THANK YOU FOR YOUR QUESTION
Cal Bedient
from Days of Unwilling



Figures undifferentiated from their ground,
like hair curlers and a paper-towel-
flowered-patterned nightgown in the pubic kitchen

dusk? Like the languishing theory
of pogroms, seeing that “an object of history
cannot be targeted at all

within the continuous elapse of history”?
Was that the question, dear?

Yes, even if it’s female of the landscape
to sway into forms, like a well
trained soprano’s scream, a scream

is still a scream. The ground of things
shivers under the jerked-out texts

of the guns, of which
the shivering is the message, don’t you agree?

I base my thinking on Benjamin’s
Arcades Project and how glass

architecture is a late stage of development,
scholastic and deceptively open,

compared to which
a woman’s love is “luxuriant sap,” which is why

the branches twist, compared to which
“barbarism lurks in the very concept of culture.”

Made by burning, the building is burning.