^{Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto,
President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976}

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
                                     Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or 
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number? 
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I 
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
                   terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I 
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
                   wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

           ^{2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022…}

And sparrows unthread nests, bring their young nothing
And shadows best seen inside the pitch of a cave
And three hearts stabbed on a train because of courage
And jacarandas flick cinder and blacken the ground
And the harbor horn is a creature roping hulls to the reefs
And the reefs gleam with chrome and absence
And absence is welcome
The bullet is welcome
The malignant cell is welcome
The gray faces and their merciless tongues are welcome
And a father is reptilian in his regard. And a mother stitches
Her lips like a wound.  And the wound smells of silence and its blaring
And a child lays hands on a mine.  And a man swallows his lies without measure
And a woman is told she is less than him she is less than the bodies left
Behind, less than the unmade, the never-was, the dirt forgotten by the tracks
And I no longer care about the losses. I no longer care if the last 
Bit of bark is stripped from the earth, if the starved possum survives
The road, whether my neighbor coughs blood while she drags off a red
Or the hand turning the knob means me harm. I no longer fear 
The inexorable diagnosis, the oceans rising to such heights
In my dreams they are monstrous but we are all still running 
Towards each other, in this latest hour, refusing to shutter our eyes.