Up Woodward Avenue, as the fires around us
rage like adrenalized orange lilies—some of the lilies
blooming out of the apartment building windows,
while others devolve into furnaces in the parked cars
now imploding in on themselves in cavernous flames
from the Everything, steeping itself right back down
into the Nothing—he and I walk together. He is
describing the style of conversation at play here:
is saying: the whole city is Molotov cocktails and looting,
is gunshots, wounds and shouting, is bloodshed,
and a style of thirst, something always unrequited;
and he tells me: this is how you all commune here together,
as if violence, atrocity, is a language. A communal
experience. Says to me: you won’t understand it—
unless I draw it for you as an Angel; let’s call it the
Angel of Atrocity—some avenging being, come
here to advertise itself as a form of mayhem and horror.
It could happen in Detroit or Portland. Does it matter?
You see, it’s so very hard to tolerate the stupefied gasp
emerging from our differences here, and so we must
flood it full of these torrents of atrocity, because we
hate what we cannot know and we crave what appeals
to us—which is how this wheel turns on and on.
We walk together up the avenue where fires burn. He
shows me where the Algiers is. What is the Algiers Motel?
I ask, and he informs me it is just a party den, where
some young black musicians and some white girls
are drinking together, and shooting the shit, and he
shows me one of the men, embracing a girl, and he says,
there it is: this thirst, and it is okay; it is the way
we design a fixed containment: the man is excited
for the way her skinny languorous body embraces
his body, and she too, is a doubt, seeking to fix herself
to a surety, which is how we all confuse a fulfillment
of desire with being something; some finite object
of attraction—in a whirlpool of not-knowing. And now
he shows me how the crazed policemen will arrive,
themselves also fixities inside a blue uniformed style—
seeking to gain egress against oblivion, and so they
must be something, some aggregate against all this existence
and so we must watch how they line the scared white
women and the black men up against the wall—so
as to locate where it is the impulse to play together
becomes a locomotion of sin, or a broken rule none
of them can comprehend. It is okay to watch this, says
the Angel of Atrocity: we are just noticing with our
craving and our thirst how it comes to be we enter
into aversion with one another: but let me shift your
focus, he says: now look down—at the fluoride blue
swimming pool, where they were swimming together;
check out the diseased palm tree there, in the center
of Detroit City! And notice the rear annex, where people
gather together in the kitchenettes to cook food, gulp
their handfuls of drugs in a circle. It’s just life, he says.
They’re just attempting to release themselves—from a
fullness, that’s all. And it is this fullness, this satiety,
this deep craving to satisfy what is astonished alarm
that stumbles us down into mayhem, into atrocity.
And now he has me touch my own belly where I am
numb; he tells me: look, you cannot fill up horror
with this false emptiness; you must own what you are.
We are confused actors; we must see what we do.
Only then will we be able to cease injuring ourselves.
This is just one incident; to be followed by everything else.
I tell you, there is no end to how cruelty plays chess. 
Racism, greed, rabid ignorance; these are the atrocities.
Now, he shows me the policemen shooting the kids.
Shows me how they are gunned down in the motel.
We watch them collapse into their own piles of atrocity.
Points to the policemen who are doing all the killing.
Tells me they’re drowning in oblivion, because to be free
is too heavy for them, and so they shoot it dead, all
this free space to expand. They are constricting, so as to
create a world more governable for themselves—
the riddle of this mandala, being confused virtues:
this rage, this terror, this crazed defense of territory.
And it is this catastrophe that shows us—again—that we
are already a broken territory that doesn’t even know
it is already broken. And so one of the policemen seeks
himself inside aggressive strivings while the other
seeks himself inside assimilation of disorder, and you,
says the Angel of Atrocity, to me, seek yourself in the
fantasy that all this we are seeing can be computable
within an abiding sense of self, which is untrue, but
you persist in it; in this torment of sickness that tells
you the external (this motel) and the internal (you),
are distinct thirsts that you will have to make sense of,
because you too are a matter of history on the wheel.
Morality’s always earned by an accumulation of hurt,
by a horrified destruction of the body, a mangling of it—
which is why the imago of George Floyd stings us now
and why the Algiers Motel is one of the cauldrons of hell,
like a story of understanding that cannot understand itself,
he whispers; and ethics measures the care or misuse
of the truth, which is why consent always mattered.
Tells me it is okay: because bare attention to detail
is all we have in the face of atrocity, all we’re capable
of doing in the open ignorance of all this clinging
and hurt calamity. And then he embraces me gently,
holds me while I vanish into the Algiers Motel incident,
and into everything else thereafter, ’til now.

*