Conditionally Acceptable Damage

Let the partially damaged homes provide shelter
Let the pre-war memories
Let the besieged
Let rubble
Let exile
Let citation
Let deliberate destruction
Let our attachments
Let memory’s performance
Let identity’s performance
Let humiliation
Let desire
Let the investors
Let the streets and the alleys
Let a cat crossing the road
Let banality
Let evidence
Let the expelled
Let counter and public
Let personhood
Let trauma’s singular
Let trauma’s collective
Let reconstructions of symbols
Let lyric
Let failure
Let your belated attention
Let urgency
Let dissident knowledge
Let autobiography
Let scenes of systematic damage
Let acceptable damage
Let repossession
Let my children’s children
Let disembodiment
Let no sublime carcass
Let alleged love stories
Let injury and purpose
Let no interpretation
Let no site of beauty
Let protest
Let terror, by definition
Let annihilation beyond identification
Let authorization
Let endowments of meaning
Let signification
Let zero signification
Let smoke
Let story
Let salvage
Let my heightened representation
Let the places I formerly inhabited
As it were