I want to read everything Dionne Brand has written ever. Every single word, every last painstaking, unforgiving conclusion. I want to read everything she’s ever written.

some words can make you weep,
when they’re uttered, the light rap of their
destinations, the thud as if on peace, as if on cloth,
on air, they break all places intended and known

I have a paper on her Inventory due in four days. I haven’t written a single word.
At 6000 words, it’ll be the longest essay I’ve ever written. At 75%, it’ll also be the one with the greatest academic weight.

I have tried to write this thing calmly
even as its lines burn to a close. I have come to know
something simple. Each sentence realised or
dreamed jumps up like a pulse with history and takes a
side. What I say in any language is told in faultless
knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping

I already know I’ll be submitting it late. Worse, I already know that I will write a paper that will strain to originality but never get past overly earnest mediocrity.
At risk to my fragile internal equanimity, I want to read every word she’s ever had published.

still I must say something here
something that drives this verse into the future
not where I go loitering in my sleep

And then I’ll write this heartbreakingly bland paper, with its cringe-inducing moments of stark floridity, and make a promise to myself that one day I will come back to it, to revisit it, destroy it, rewrite it into something I’d think worth reading. And know all the while that this is a promise I will not keep.

happiness is not the point really, it’s a marvel,
an accusation in our time

annotations
i. Inventory
ii. “no language is neutral.” No Language is Neutral.
iii. “hard against the soul.” No Language is Neutral.
iv. Inventory