Millions of Us poem – Alice Notley

Purportedly a chain of civilians, soldiers, voices

lice they were called. It is sometimes sufficient to beg

Lice creeping over one, kill them with a chemical;

then there are lice-ghosts everywhere. Glints of pearly

nails. The light of my beloved will keep me from noticing.

Trailer to keep her in; he asked me if I knew her ‘auction name.’

Walked over the scorch; what are values when there’s nothing here?

The wing of a dead soul grows into all the lace you see through,

foreigner, lice-ridden article of divestment. Splendid vices

pouring outcomes over the eager cash flow promotions.

So many of the dead came to me that their transparencies

covered my visage, I’m too near you. Don’t you want to see?

We came from faraway camps, forsaking the human because it

broke our bodies into pieces for the torturer’s pet, who

propositions you. There is always a slant on it. The trees must

go down; or light affects your eyes badly. We pleaded for an

adjustment, before we’d recognizably died. You

told me you were a heart, but you were guarding a tower. You

said you were a failure, but you helped destroy us.

Wings all over me, stuck to my skin, there’s no point to it

why are you here when there’s nothing? We just don’t believe it.

Now not no never you. I wasn’t you. You have to talk to me

my name is irretrievable. No one letting you go because you

are prized for not existing except as a body, now not.

No I don’t exist, alighting and ghoulishly begging you for a

drop of your blood, a morsel of your flesh. Yes take some of

me, though there are so many others with flesh. But they’re too

rich to give. I know they will never let you in, you beautiful

kids who haunt the corridors extending through

the invisible world, so you can find your way. So you can see

past the smoke of disastrous fear acting out of dreams:

it creeps everywhere. See how it took them over, for

they had no mind to stand against any fantasy the instigators

chose. Had no minds at all. When I was little, no one told

me I’d have to suffer. Who can be a child? And the ghoul

patiently explains how the wing of a word can extend till the

barrier is made, so they can’t see us. If you say beauty, that

will be ignored, and we can hide. It was his name a long time ago,

before the auctions began. Her face then was large and younger.

She can be lice or ghoul. I want that, I don’t want action. But I

will have to live off bits of you.

The new definition of witch is one who lets them eat you, if

they have to. Because you keep regenerating. Oh that’s such an oldy,

and all that flying. Sometimes they do—the man who showed me a

few things sits all day. The teaching is to let them come as far as

inside you even, empty enough; I can hear them and render affection

Why, if there’s nothing? Is this nothing? But you are destroyed

We shake all the time. You remind me of someone else I knew.

The wing is inscribed, forinvolute. Not to beg in the offering

of primal services, we have come here. No one would let us tell

anything but our bodily humiliations; had to do differently, not for

redemption, because we are more than redemption. I am my maker.

The shape formed by the bits of mirror glued on is unimportant.

They’re inside my chest and stomach, and they glitter in there.

Then if light disattaches, comes up to be spoken, you

can see and you can hear. This is true because each of you has this

too. Has all the bright pieces inside: there was nothing else

left to be. Then I say it, like these pages, or how they would

love me for hosting them. The earliest people feared them,

and subsequent ones deny the dead. Why would I be afraid of

all the people dead and martyred? I thought you were talking

about words. You knew I wasn’t.

Dido who had to be delivered from the wrong story:

I want you to know I’m no longer left over. What about our

library, nothing good left there? I want to read the fashion of when you

were old a long time ago. Gothic roses in the type; I’m an ancient

Had read every the book of before they arrested me.

I had crossed the black plain, I had held tears it was abrupt

to be walked in a herd pushing us, wherever we went to be shot, or

executed in the earlier style. It is a timeless death placed next to the

most beat-up books. Only a book can love me now. We’re reading

without real eyes; I’ve read everything too, or in the tradition of

telling it is repeated within you what we did. We must have

been trying to make something as we are now, but why. You

have the ear for it. The light wants you to reply, asking if a

shore had been attained or if the language were Dutch or Swahili

I didn’t know. It is how you raised the ground, like raising a child

every word that comes out of my mouth torn I’m responsible to

The wind foul pieces here tries to turn me from tenderness, the way

they killed us in the center of the city, that night. The bodies

floated in the river while I looked for other souls and saw my face

water damaged a new texture and how can I see? Potential

returning within its white petals and central whorl.

He couldn’t believe someone would hate and betray. I

told him, but he refused to believe it; then I left the room.

This lace has to be made. Treason said the ghoul that

peculiar invention betrayal, how primal was that?

In Hesiod after the light, after chaos and lover. Said the armless

woman, said the one cut open, said the smallpoxed

the strewn children their bodies woven into the page

so I could find what they thought, even if babies only cry.

Those are the bodies when I was no longer alive but uplifted

butterfly of lace with an empty length to bifurcate my symmetry.

No I don’t believe the lies of the live. I am a spot of light in

order to find out, hanging on because it wasn’t revealed in

death. I know what happened to me, she said; bleeding I

lay there unblessed. Do I want a blessing now, or a god to

rebuild me? We have gone beyond god or new lives, or death, or

tribes. I am working on this lace light at present; I accept the

drop of sacrificial blood to propitiate me. One piece of you at a time

is all I need. I am letting you feed, I say, because I know this has

always been. You’ve been telling me for years

We needed you, if no one else did. We have this project to

change our silence into the beautiful city of a voice.