NDN Coping Mechanisms by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Author:Billy-Ray Belcourt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poems
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2019-08-21T17:27:50+00:00

Ars Poetica

In an essay called “Is There Any Poetic Writing?,” Roland Barthes argues that words do not merely “reproduce the depth and singularity of an individual experience.” For him, “they are spread out to form a surface.”

I wrote a poem to resemble a forest floor teeming with decaying vegetation.

A struggling thing isn’t a struggling thing

if everything else is in a state of rot.

Nothing can be turned inside out if “inside” and “out”

are free-floating concepts in a world without direction.

No one wants to be a free-floating concept

unless emptiness is a harrowing feat.

*

Warsan Shire: “You can’t make homes out of human beings.”

I’ve seen homesick insomniacs, uninterested in rest,

engineer bedrooms out of the loose skin of the poet.

I too have laid myself flat on the sullied mattress of a poem,

if only to roll off the edge

of a line break.

*

A poem is a funhouse with warped mirrors.

From it, one gleans

a distorted image of oneself.

A poem, however, isn’t a mirror.

A mirror wants nothing for itself.

A poem, a surface

to boomerang a future history, a future past.

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