We are pushing this n-tieth exile…
by Nina Živančević

			For my friend, anarcho-anthropologist, Comrade in exile, brother in Arms, David Graeber

1. We are all 99 percent
2. And I am 100 percent sure
3. That exile is a chained melody, babble in chains
4. Transformational grammar in pain
5. Weak thought in labor
6. Laughter in distress
7. Smile in despair
8. Love was in the air but high anxiety
9. Got hold of it,
10. The better part of my Id wanted
11. To quit this place of forlorn hopes
12. Moons ago,
13. Much earlier than your Trintignant unique image got to these shores
14. Oh, when you see, my king D.,
15. My high-school Levinasian royalty,
16. A Mabuhay forest moving to your private garden you should run away,
17. A field-work for eternity, seashells instead of money
18. Getting paid in spices and sunglasses
19. Cleaning the filthiest gutters in this new land
20. Draining your students minds for posterity
21. Please don't cry when nobody sees you-
22. The spiritual court will never grant mercy to me nor you alone
23. Oh, when I saw you there, you silly giggly thing,
24. In a Portobello courtyard stuffed with dolls,
25. I knew I wouldn't escape the glitter of my destiny,
26. The shiny trinkets in the jaws of your scrutiny,
27. The totem pole of this finality, and it was
28. Then they had dinner for us on the upper floor of
29. Your dwelling and the rest is history…

1. Do you know that nani means “thank you” in Malayan and that the Tamiils are not really black?
2. Was that fieldwork in Madagascar really a lesson in anxiety?
3. And is this European field-work tougher than the other aboriginal,
4. Ethical ground where they feed us to the sharks and larks
5. Disappearing in light dusk of the British lakes?
6. How could they ever think we were just
7. Some fakes
8. Feeding ourselves on tons of pure
9. Chocolate, out of sadness?
10. We are 99 percent, you said,
11. And I say that Exile is 100 percent torture, mixed with the powder of Oblivion
12. Reading sadness;
13. Language is space pointing at geometry of our souls
14. Down by Ashbery’s lacustrine
15. Cities and
16. Up beyond Joycian silent hills,
17. Where verse is in labor,
18. Delivering a child of street speech,
19. Without punctuation. And you,
20. With those bright feathers that
21. You placed up the totem pole near the canoe, floating down that
22. Aboriginal river of your singing voice...
23. Wait, are we the strangers all this young in here? Coming
24. From some very, very young
25. And infantile tribe?
26. And what are we to do with the shamans dealing with
27. Stupidity and administration, in every damned shtetl we passed through?
28. As if the algebra of heartache had
29. To knock down every wall
30. And every barbed wire we ran into…
31. The comfort of strangers is
32. The pivotal moment of deep sleep,
33. Into which I sink having met the Big Other
34. Who tends to your architectural structural network
35. Where the intuition slumbers
36. And the doors of perceptive dungeon
37. Open up;
38. It was Vienna,
39. And it was 1893…
40. My ankle was broken and your mind elsewhere;
41. Hey, the King of silly laughter,
42. Listen to your heartbeat:
43. Tick tack tick tack tick tack and yes, tick
44. The answer after which
45. This world is not going to be better off
46. It's not going to save the poor
47. But just decorate them
48. With the Maori shells
49. Instead of money
50. And was it Shakespeare who had seen us all in a huge dungeon?
51. And was it Andrew Marvell who laughed it off with his
52. Ha ha ha ha ha ha
53. On his lost road to Damascus?
54. And was it John Donne who could have done without the world
55. Painted all in green hues and shadows?
56. Pkk and Kobané are surely not going to
57. Survive without you, so you need not hold onto your colonial stick and
58. That trickster’s top hat, and
59. In this Temple here,
60. In this god-forlorn Shtetl,
61. I'm in a courtroom full of flowers.
62. The spiritual court is in session
63. And some red liquid leaking from the ante-chamber of my heart. Shhhhhh…
64. The violins are playing and Chagall
65. Is playing chess with Duchamp…

1. Exile is such a long nonsensical thing, your majesty,
2. And this Song of Songs
3. Is about to shut my screen off, and just before it all ends now,
4. Now you should know--that
5. In order to give, one has to really get,
6. That instant of music
7. Oozing from the crack
8. In the Tree of life painted in Kabbalah
9. Ah, the tree, my King of Davids,
10. And the soft breeze from the Mediterranean cliffs,
11. So
12. Elohim and Elohena, thus
13. To life!
14. Elohim and Elohena
15. And thus,
16. To life!!
17. Elohim,
18. Elohim, Elohena,
19. I see Him,
20. The way I see
21. You,
22. The huge
23. Speckle of light
24. In the radiant Temple
25. Washed in light!

			Dawnbreak in Paris, October 14, 2015