A man can lie to himself. A man can lie with his tongue and his brain and his gesture; a man can lie with his life. But the body is simple as a turtle and straight as a dog: the body cannot lie. You want to take your good body off like a glove. You want to stretch it and shrink it as you change your abstractions. You stand in flesh with shame. You smell your fingers and lick your disgust and are satisfied. But the beaten dog of the body remembers. Blood has ghosts too. 2. You speak of the collective. Then you form your decisions and visit them on others like an ax. Broken open I have learned to mistrust a man whose rhetoric is good and whose ambition is fierce: a man who says we, moving us, and means I and mine. 3. Many people have a thing they want to protect. Sometimes the property is wheat, oil fields, slum housing, plains on which brown people pick green tomatoes, stocks in safety deposit boxes, computer patents, thirty dollars in a shoebox under a mattress. Maybe it’s a woman they own and her soft invisible labor.
What do You think about Circles On The Water (2013)?
