Now I’m walking the levee
Amongst meth head zombies
When a raccoon reminds me
To keep my hand on my knife.
you cozy up to anyone
stepping off a freight train
with a patch above their hearts
Repulsed,
I read his essay
about why it’s unnatural
for gays to marry, red pen poised. I am not
neutral, not objective. Speech is free, but so is judgment.
…death’s heads some absence here or of what sensed in outstretched limbs a broken jawline’s exigency/ stone winds resurgence ever where nothing of reeks blind taste some solace no return again begin again/ in wind’s reveal of collapse bitten as if to cherish pummeling absurdly lock associative/ till skull skinned screaming in an abort of flame settling into ash...
Ghosts come calling. Fill your voice mail,
search you out in want ads, bloat your belly
all night with confusions of 0s and 1s.
Indecipherable guilt leaking into the lines.
assistance gone alone with both lonely days without both fluish angry needing not
their fault hungry homework nights without can’t sleep, doesn’t doctor says just one
pill per small hands stretching, reaching must watch them closely always loads of
laundry hungry exhaustion just one pill bedwetting wakes older regression consoling
Many of you have already been taken,
some of us anticipate the slack whoosh and hum
that signal alien arrival above just-cut crop circles.
Many of you, back in your cubicles, wear half-smiles,
Carolyn just loves
da new house in Kahala.
Hard to believe dat she grew up as wun local
cause she look and act like wun Katonk.
Brown girl, brown girl
her guilt is so deep and juicy in her thigh bone
that when her God consumes her, she is sure
He will suck the seasoned marrow
our nile river sinks into street gutters
summer season is almost here
so dance for rain black baby
dance for rain.
“We are certain that there is some connection between poltergeists and puberty and that the mysteries of sex enter largely into their doings. And all the available evidence points to the fact that poltergeists prefer girl adolescents to boys - the ratio is about 95% to 5% respectively.”
—Harry Price, “Can we Explain the Poltergeist?” (1945)
the onion you lay line by line,
a hybrid thing both occidental and oriental
is a struggle against the void.
Hybrid like love cold, like love hot, like love open-ended.
I’m a dead frog and I don’t say this with any pity or understanding or shame it’s just an observation that people seem to like us, like us a bit too much because they like to push hooks through our jaws and cast us out to sea, as well as amputate us for fine dining and draw us as a cartoon
I heard 2 shots in my neighborhood today
now none of my friends want to come out and play.
I said I hard 2 shots in my neighborhood today
and now none of my friends want to come out and play.
Black poets
deserve the luxury of writing about nothing—
sometimes—
to speak for no one,
“The white cops were right,” they chanted,
more Blacks need beating
and we need more guns.
Too many getting rich off welfare
too lazy to work.”
Make me somebody
nobody wants
to stand around.
Make me your social problem.
Make me feel lost, branded
and hide whipped.
I wonder if what I’m seeing is only my silence
my little silent laugh my little look-around
at the forest of faces growing new faces a long line
of faces and now the old white guy is busy
filling out his form hunched over all his words
I left the south for the west
and browned like a sugar sprinkled pecan.
There’s nothing wrong with brown
The yellow leasing office boy says,
I was talking about the carpet in the model unit,
I hate people who say something (then repeat it)
I hate people who say something (then repeat it)
I hate people who say something (then repeat it)
I hate bands that play too loud over the poetry
I HATE POETS THAT READ TOO LOUD
I HATE POETS THAT READ TOO LOUD
I HATE POETS THAT READ TOO LOUD
Say nothing when people pet your head. Smile (and don’t be angry, no
not that) when they do it without asking. Shrug because you have no
explanation why your hair grows that way
she said with her own eyes she had seen
men with horses
men with rope
tie a loop and wrap a noose
around the neck
around the throat
of a little black boy just like me
your names were waiting for me
on the kitchen counter,
in a freshly printed newspaper,
and I with my responsible empathy
read your obituaries
The perception that we are
Permitted to enter into
The populous is paradoxical
That is to say only possible
So as long as our persons
Don't come too close
Cops don't say that they are afraid of blacks,
they just shoot them,
so why are you bringing it up on this fuck app?
My fists drum my
chest an de Village Spirit He leap to
dance in me. In hymn o plen-tay
my momma voice still weep, she
now comfort me. An in hymn o
Helicopters thud the sky with air commotion and caution
over brow crop dusting judgment light over fields of cement and barbed wire
Pot holes and cigars rolled.
Augusta Fells Savage, beaten as a child for sinning. Her sin? Sculpting clay animals. And still she worked. She worked to share her vision. Her vision took her to Rome and Paris and back again to teach, to create, to better, to live.
been wrong before. thought maybe everything was all good now.
slept through Pride. laughed about it.
snored while a parade was marching through
my upstate neighborhood.
You look like a thug’s sister.
You look like a thug’s mother.
You look like a thug’s grandson.
You look like a thug’s pal.
Click, you just received
another donation,
another like. . .
trading,
remembering
we have no life boat,
I know the truth on the hazy summer days.
when heat squeezes the odour out of breeze
caught flowers, sweaty inner thighs, and chlorine pools.
I know the truth of the sky mid-turn, mid-hack
in a cloudless space, dazed by the shimmer
They dance badly. Thousands of preteen heat proms
burning each other alive, smashing wheels into forks and spoons,
and fucking on beds made of thick, wet, addictive paint.
The wolf in the woods took my daughter
Locked her in the boardroom where she took
Down that dummy corporation
With only straw and a spinning wheel
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