I Love You, Tin Man
Lately I have been thinking about love. After the passing of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant, I was reading a dialogue she participated in regarding love as a political force. I was struck by her notion of love as a way of intentionally disrupting our notions of autonomy, of independence, of sovereignty. Love is a way in which we brazenly complicate who we are and how we move through the world, always in relation to others. This was all stewing in my head (and heart and pores) when I met with Brother Sid yesterday, though I didn’t mention it at first. I asked him how he was feeling and he wrote, “I’m inspired to hotten up poetry.” As a writer who has chronicled his “volcanic mind,” Sid was poised to go molten once more.
The words of the poem came out in a pyrotechnic barrage, each one marking its brilliance just as the previous word was beginning to fade. I confirmed all of Sid’s choices for line breaks and punctuation before asking, excitedly, what he was going to title it. The final breathtaking burst, which for readers becomes the first.
I talked briefly about love and about the way it punctures dominion, perhaps allowing us to feel, once more, our humanimal selves. When I asked Sid whether he had any response to Berlant’s ideas or my own, he wrote: “I give you freedom to interpret.” When I asked Sid if I could write it about it for The Listening World, he gave an enthusiastic yes. When I asked if he wanted to bequeath the readers anything else by way of explanation, he wrote another poem.
Destruction and creation, as my own eight-year-old son reminded me lately, cannot be separated. In destroying libraries the tomes of Sid’s mind build new yonders for us to hear, to enter, to gather. I asked Sid whether it was a tear rhyming with ear or a tear rhyming with care or both. He confirmed that it was tear rhyming with care.
Sometimes we have to find the tear where we can pass through to new worlds, to new loves. Sometimes the gory night is hotter than the day. Sometimes we need the darkness, and the tear we find there, to see a new light, a queer light of bonfires and tiaras, growing and glowing just beyond.
In Some Yonder,
Brother Chris