A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters (audio only)
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I refuse to choose
between lynch rope and gang rape
the blues is the blues!
my skin and my sex: Deep dues
I have no wish to escape
I refuse to lose
the flame of my single space
this safety I choose
between your fist and my face
between my gender and race
All black and blue news
withers the heart of my hand
and leads to abuse
no one needs to understand:
suicide wipes out the clues
Big-Time-Juicy-Fruit!
Celebrity-Rich-Hero
Rollin out the Rolls!
Proud cheatin on your (Black) wife
Loud beatin on your (white) wife
Real slime open mouth
police officer-true-creep
evil-and-uncouth
fixin to burn black people
killin the song of our sleep
Neither one of you
gets any play in my day
I know what you do
your money your guns your say
so against my pepper spray
Okay! laugh away!
I hear you and I accuse
you both: I refuse
to choose: All black and blue news
means that I hurt and I lose.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
we once was warriors
bone sharp and tangling up
wit whatever wild was in the world
before some ships rolled in
wit folk we ain’t never seen
brandin iron and bullet men
claimin everythin
leavin misery
maybe
they know we ain’t always
been so lowly
so feverish wit brokenness
so in fil trated
maybe they can look past
the bruises
to see when we
were bigger underneath
and forgive us our frailty
we was overcome
wit the kind of
meanness that don’t care
about nothin but
feedin itself
we had hands once
and a river to bathe in
and names
full names
that called us home.
the chil’ren might know that
if they lookin at us right
we lost our mouths
‘cross a mighty mighty ocean.
coulda died but we don’t know how…
Don't need picket fences, brick wall,
or razor wire. Our home's protected by
prickly pear cactus and thorny bougainvillea.
*
Native or not, you're welcome in our gardens.
Lavender's dress is not so vibrant as your
green trousers and purple velour sleeves.
I could string him back up the tree, if you’d like.
Return his skin’s meaning to an easy distance, coal dust, blaze
And Willie Brown him. You
Love how the blood muddies the original,
The way it makes a stage of my speechifying, this leeching
Capital from his dying,
Like an activist. I know
I’m not supposed to sing
Of his ringing
Penetrability, some hole I open impose
On the form—but all I see is bullets, bullets discerning him,
As years ago it was rope.
I could pull it tighter, finger each bullet deeper,
If you’d like, an inch rougher,
Far enough to where becomes that second heat, erotic.
I could use the erotic,
If you’d like,
So ungarish, baring not too frank
A mood, subtle so you need it.— Funny
How some dark will move illicit if you close your eyes,
The way, say, my black
Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace
I put in it is not.
I could yank and knot
The rope, if you’d like, him like a strange fragment
In them trees,
And the word “again” spelled out about his neck
Would be the rope’s predicate till let wild, patterned and
Fierce his moan.
It is a tragedy. No. It is a sonnet, how I know
Already how he ends,
But I could make him
Her, if you’d like, regender them till merely
Canvas for your “empathy,”
Soup for my mouth. Still, if I could but just get
This blunt,
Burnt lynched body up
From on
Out the pocket behind my eye
All trees could be themselves again, all sound.