I think a lot of y’all have just been watching Dr. King get beat
    up and, ah

                      vacillating opportunists straining for a note of
    militancy     and ah   

Hold your great buildings on my tiny wing      or     in my tiny  
    palm      same thing different sling   

and then they shot him   and     uh               left him on the front
    lawn  of everyone’s    vulgar  delirium  
for          having been chosen       walking home that night
     that’ll show you like    candy     and   love  
god     openly          reverse   order         

A bird gets along beautifully in the air, but once she is on the
    ground that special equipment hampers her a great deal.   

         And               Thereby home never gets to be a jaded
             resting place.
 

My son’s head is a fist
rapping against the door of the world.
For now, it’s dressers, kitchen islands,

dining room tables that coax his clumsy, creating
small molehills of hurt breaching
the surface. The ice pack,

a cold kiss to lessen the blow equals
a frigid intrusion, a boy cannot be a boy
with all this mothering getting in the way.

Sometimes the floor plays accomplice
snagging an ankle, elbow, top lip to swell.
Other times it’s a tantrum, when he spills his limbs

onto the hardwood, frenzied then limp with anger,
tongue clotted with frustration,
a splay of 2 year-old emotion voiced in one winding wail.

My son cannot continue this path.
Black boys can’t lose control at 21, 30, even 45.
They don’t get do-overs.
So I let him flail about now,
let him run headfirst into the wall
learn how unyielding perceptions can be.

Bear the bruising now,
before he grows, enters a world
too eager to spill his blood, too blind to how red it is.

^{And it came to pass, […] there appeared a chariot of fire
and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah
went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it,
and he cried, My father, my father . . .
            —2 Kings 2:11–12}

That Sunday in Chehalis, my father testified
and I watched as he wept before the pulpit,

his shoulders heaving, his hands
clapping up thunder above our heads,

his mouth open on the note of awe as he told us
the promise God had made in the dream:

to bring him Home before he tasted death . . .
to wake him with the scent of flowers, proof

of His presence. I learned to cry like that, as if
I could sprain the heart, the body hurting its way out.

But that morning my mind snuck
back to the nights he took paychecks and split,

sometimes for weeks, his head and body
humming for dope, his wife and kids

suspended by the boundlessness of waiting.
If he returned, if his pockets were empty,

if the locks had been changed, I’d watch
from the window as he jumped and hollered,

wide-eyed and ripping the gate from its hinges or
shattering the windshields of cars along our street

with his fists—how, as the sirens drew near,
not even God could stop him.