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NICK MAKOHA Codex of Birds In the first part of the night, I saw the coastal villages, men arguing about the price of oil and swifts darting into shadows. Their flickered outlines cast themselves into flight. When I was the night, when I was the seeker in the void, I took shape. The sun and day were no longer witnesses. It was the only way I knew to catch the world’s attention. In a universe filled with light I belonged to things that burn. That is my alibi. Trees rose over my eyelashes. The sky was filled with night. There was a time when I thought that to release myself from myself and its boiling rage I had to become the sort of animal that swallowed expensive wine from mason jars. In that doubling I began to master the speech of birds in the same way that a pilot draws darkness down. Imagine the body just passing through. Imagine a kiss that binds one animal to another. Delicious because it was hers. I was no easy prey, like an engine questioning its parts. Be flock, be mouth be the shadow. The questions you ask as you coil in a cabin - What does living do to a country that is no longer here as you push away from the earth? How can you reverse the direction of the body? Once on a plane, when I was a younger as the sky unfastened from its edge, I saw the sea as an edge and ending, as the hostess passed word from one mouth to another. Each flight a reincarnation. And now I am the sky. 3 POETRY WALES
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Flight is the tendency to move toward or away from an object. As in Basquiat’s Icarus, for instance. Notice how everything turns away. Codex SAMO© first appears as a tag on a New York city wall in 1978 two blocks down from Aswad bookstore. It is a kind of Codex to speak the unspeakable as if it were a confession on redbrick or brownstone in the hard years. Downtown, was Jean’s street studio so was the fridge, TV, wall and floor in our apartment. He saw no division between earth and sky. To call it graffiti is to call hieroglyphics gibberish. That’s ignorant. This is Jean ordering a tequila to test his outer limits. It is a summer night and we have rented two 35-mm cameras. He has figured out that a painting is stronger than memory, passports, planes and nicotine. The curtains are drawn but still no money for canvases or rent. After red wine he swears he heard the wall say - let your wrists be free. In the face of all this, he was kin to me.This is a photograph of Jean after the ten-minute set at the Mudd Club. He says – It’s not him and shows more interest in streetlamp above us. Look the camera is guessing Being a self, is a controlled hallucination generated by the brain. The night is a black moon.The Empire State building has always been a lead character in his inner movie. From the loft, it glows orange. This Jean and he says - If you can’t see his three-point crown you should see a doctor. He is divided and dying for a piss. He presents as an image of a man and as matter in motion. 4 POETRY WALES

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NICK MAKOHA Codex of Birds

In the first part of the night, I saw the coastal villages, men arguing about the price of oil and swifts darting into shadows. Their flickered outlines cast themselves into flight. When I was the night, when I was the seeker in the void, I took shape. The sun and day were no longer witnesses. It was the only way I knew to catch the world’s attention. In a universe filled with light I belonged to things that burn. That is my alibi. Trees rose over my eyelashes. The sky was filled with night. There was a time when I thought that to release myself from myself and its boiling rage I had to become the sort of animal that swallowed expensive wine from mason jars. In that doubling I began to master the speech of birds in the same way that a pilot draws darkness down. Imagine the body just passing through. Imagine a kiss that binds one animal to another. Delicious because it was hers. I was no easy prey, like an engine questioning its parts. Be flock, be mouth be the shadow. The questions you ask as you coil in a cabin - What does living do to a country that is no longer here as you push away from the earth? How can you reverse the direction of the body? Once on a plane, when I was a younger as the sky unfastened from its edge, I saw the sea as an edge and ending, as the hostess passed word from one mouth to another. Each flight a reincarnation. And now I am the sky.

3 POETRY WALES

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