Digital Poetics #24 side with the immanent vex: prologue by James Goodwin

Accrued after viewing the Manchester taser shooting of Desmond Ziggy Mombeyarara, and his young son's gut-wrenching cries ringing in my head as he (I and we) watched his father collapse to the ground unconscious, side with the immanent vex is a dysorderly attempt to situate the intense register of his resistant, resounding protest in the musicality of a vexed syntax and frayed grammar, given, always, in a pensive reflection on blackness as the animaterial proliferation, or fleshing out, of a phonomorphological analyrics withheld from within the dominant linguistic paradigms of poetic value, but unceasing in its demand to comprehend an ineffable disjuncture in black expressive revolt that rivets the boy’s cry (and others like it) to a presence without truth, an absence without possibility.

impatience in plain that we let the damned and wretched wave new circutry. think oxygenated epidermis torn wasted driven on ends siding with the immanent vex; through trabecular songs approximating stuttered oceanics; unremitting wakes out from fleshing the contact of sound unmade coming already met finally conscripts around its involution of new-new phase transitions in the crypt. might just feel like finding other ways to lurk without shops opening shutters onto seasides we couldn’t discern with our hands. a strip of air whips from essential to essential, right down to this essence of evasion so much that it takes us along a delphic soma, with the same interminable sky we love this something that we are at all, strick in daylighting cycles and collexions in never having been back from a felled miasma. the night holds philharmonics we forget as long as there’s also the promise of a sea without terminus, far out-from the familial subsmumations of an uncheckable key it lit until years later. yard overflows an expanse of planetary mains wherewithal the impress bespeaking encountered restless othering encounters. feels like coruscating an exsense we wear outside of ourselves for the life on track. listen instead for the elated skip, boldened, elastic. to seven blacks killed in a septet and more caught slipping in and out sing but here we’re the ones that need help living how to see our emissions hum hell a lot colder and purely unrepeated. our residues are animaterial, brush cosubstantial, marauding a failed subjectivity lest the dead and dying smoke a personal orbit they pretend to dip, outlast yr tug set, overlay a more tabenacular beam, but still give for u and yr friends iterant twilights yr the black night, doused levity, fish fish of an indigo rasa, staring blank aboriginal salt back, still clapping the same broad sways of high windrush outside our lanes and streets for one of the people’s cracked anathemic songs saying true say we run upon how we sounded lyric for lyric like you think is that what you think? stepping yr way out of this poetry for what was left unsaid of yr sense of touch through feeling these sensations I can feel yr tares in our gilded fabric like granular scansion stress audible to remission, as lysed sentimental house and harbour for the immanent vex but must not but nobody knows. crypt in resounding this or that metaphoric hylomorph thrusting a black kid/s spit an arial pleonasm makes (in us) sit and shit an organising principle we don’t leave outside or inside our ruinous flooring, teeth and skin, lip, nail, eyelid, breath and phosphorous, more spit without making duppy and instead, when I don’t know you but you must know who I am, sincapated plumes and shattered. in blockaids there’s echo in compress. corners on corners lyric vex on long sequesters. black eviscerating givenness taking us up in the clouds. seeded liminal looks gave ancestors enfleshed. you can’t see their relflection’s glare of sunlight rim they’re too alloyed and all day artfully black boreal. blacklight visioning the same splitting of black action going to this place called nowhere fast and it’s got to work. irreal, hard flat, never says what, because they’re there from aeons and rhythms. rhythms of work setting pace around the bits of anamorphological rhythms of work setting pace around the bits of grim shard ice. shadows be barely viewed crossing blocked-off lays cresting a pure state lexis behind the curb in ethereal offshot rules of threes unprotected still built to task /yet/ nobody made us. just roll back abiding, script a deadweight ride; speak an aporectic crowd in a burst daydream on a realer rhododendron. can’t then CCTV a slice of black worldsheet the way we lay of the land under streetlight mystic arch

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James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we're in: composition for friends, is forthcoming with Face Press; and his book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip, is forthcoming with the87press.

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This publication is in Copyright. James Goodwin, 2020.

The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.