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notice now pictures of awful things on top our head
the freight that barricades this view, how enough
how the law batter down the dogged tide we make
the world shoring its dark scars between seasons
as though to hold it together only by a flame
is here a voice to please enough the blunt
borderlessness of this grief turning our heads to rubble
the lunacy of nothing so limning as death in the streets
in these vibrating hours where the corners talk back
need I simply run my tongue along the granite sky and live

to know how lost the millionth life somewhere today
the swift shape of roads new names combust, the sum
of anthems flooding the world with the eye’s sudden and narrow
saltwater and streets ziplined with screams at the pitch of cooking pots
then tear gas, then pepper spray, then militarized lies unzipping
body bags, oh, our many many there, our alive and just born,
and that is how to say let’s fuck it up, we the beat and we the loud
tuning forks and the help arriving empty-handed
propping the hot news of new times on our head

days like these pleat whatever the hollow year must offer
between the not-yet-dead and those just waking up
it will not be the vanished thing that we remember
it will be what we exchanged close to midnight
like smugglers high-wiring the city, hoarding the thoughts
of ours we interrupted midway to discovering the velocity
of the burning world below
of our language in the lateness of our stuck and reckless love

where the forces who claim they love us
level our lives to crust—the centuries-wide dance
of swapped shackles for knees
their batons and miscellany
thrown at our whole lives demanding our mothers
raise from their separate rooms, separate graves, today
to save who and me? I open the book to a naked page
where nothing clatter my heart, what head
what teeth cling to broadside, roll alias after
alias with a pen at their dull tribunes and shrines
imagine our heirlooms of shot nerves make a life
given to placards and synergies and elegies, but more

last things: where letters here where snow in May
where the millennium unstitches the quartered earth
in June, how many today to the viral fire
the frosted rich and their forts, but not
the fulsome rage of my people unpeaced
mute boots with somber looks appear
a fearsome autumn ending spring, though we still hear

I dare not sing

another song to dig a hole this time for the lineages
of magnolias where the offspring bring a hand to cover
our mouth, our heaping lives, who sit who burn who drop
three feet to the tar, who eat and demolish the thing
that takes our head, the thing that is no more
the place that never was except a burning learned

just once and not again when the darker working’s race

Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth, and sea.
                 Black men are most men; but the white are free!
White things are rare things; so rare, so rare
They stole from out a silvered world—somewhere.
Finding earth-plains fair plains, save greenly grassed,
They strewed white feathers of cowardice, as they passed;
                 The golden stars with lances fine
                 The hills all red and darkened pine,
They blanched with their wand of power;
And turned the blood in a ruby rose
To a poor white poppy-flower.

They pyred a race of black, black men, 
And burned them to ashes white; then
Laughing, a young one claimed a skull.
For the skull of a black is white, not dull, 
                 But a glistening awful thing;
                 Made it seems, for this ghoul to swing
In the face of God with all his might,
And swear by the hell that siréd him:
                 “Man-maker, make white!”

At the end of every holocaust film I’ve seen and there

are not that many

they show real life survivors and the lines are

Never Again

and some of us like me/stare into these films

down long tunnels of history

wondering how it could have ever happened at all

that a leader and his minions could be so toxic, poisonous

you’d turn against your neighbors

and you could be so oblivious, brainwashed, scared

desperate to be superior or to survive

you’d do anything-or almost.

They say never again

but it is again

as I look at the deportations

round ups

I’m reminded of Idi Amin when he cast out foreigners

and Forest Whitaker in the film The Last King of Scotland/when he played him.

And to see it is again

at rallies, at protests, they show the coat hangers and crude instruments

women were forced to use in back alley abortions

We say never again but taking away women’s choice

and Planned Parenthood it is again.

Today started out in an argument with a so called fan

who didn’t understand why I mentioned race so much in my new book

and that white man is not the first/a black woman

asked too.

I wanted to scream HELLO haven’t you seen the news?

Didn’t you see what happened to Stephon Clark?

unarmed and shot in the back six times by police

And no one even cares what happens to women/

Black lesbians or lesbians of color

There’s no public outcry.

A student once wrote to me in an academic paper

that a parent forced her to stop playing sports

because they said sports made her more of a dyke

It murdered my student inside because she was an athlete

Yeah so the white guy I argued with about my book

said he was just giving me some good advice

from his experience as an empath

I said I don’t need your advice

I have reasons for talking about race and gender in the interpersonal

He said he was just trying to help me.

I’ll offer this non-sequitur

Winnie Mandela died a few weeks ago

She had great impact on me

I read she was nobility

But then of course the difference between her and say

how Princess Diana was treated

Everyone accepted and loved Diana’s silent/passive status

She was allowed to be gorgeous

No one ever associated her with that dirty colonial stain

There are moments in that recent Winnie Mandela doc that stand out to me

where she buried her face in her hands and screamed out

as I have so many times, “I’ve been betrayed”/the other moment

was when she said she was the only ANC member

brought to TRC and made to testify

Also that Nelson Mandela forgave a nation

but he could never forgive her.

I think what was done to Winnie

is also done to other Black women and working artists

Black women fighting to give language/resistance

but it only matters when a celebrity says or does it.

At Cape Coast Castle in Ghana after you’ve passed

the door of no return

there is a plaque donated to the Castle by Black tribal elders/it reads:

May we never sell ourselves into slavery again...

But it is Again.

startling semiannual saccharine sensitivity to sentencing in a season of severing and severances to so called civil servants of streachery and separation i sense a series of spectators or investigators wont save us like stolen generators nothing speculative about spectacles we beasts spit and sputter   spits and sputters splitting sutures of your occipital up your occidental skeptical of this spectacular softness of this plexus flex i choose the best for myself   swearing the swivel of the stank of spangled smear with speared wet spirit spent to coalesce in this nonsense that’s the thing about your language is i make it sound so good it doesnt have to make sense they is all what you is where you from  someone tell these oxymorons we is dual citizens former resident aliensss and we have only just begun counting down this society’s days with the efficiency of arabic numerals