to confess that he knew people like you.
& you are free, you are what they call out
& off papers & living in a state where you’re
not disenfranchised. In prison, you listened
to the ballot or the bullet & imagined that
neither was for you, having failed with
the pistol & expecting the ballot to be
denied. But nah, you found free & in line
notice that this is not like the first time
you & the woman you’d marry got naked
& sweated & moaned & funked up a room
not belonging to either of you. That lady
is with you now & a kid is in your arms,
& you are wearing a Nat Turner T-shirt
as if to make a statement at the family
reunion. Everyone around you is Black,
which is a thing you notice. & you know
your first ballot will be cast for a man
who has the swag that seems inherited.
It’s early but there is no crust in your eyes.
You wanted this moment like freedom.
You cast a ballot for a Black man in
America while holding a Black baby.
Name a dream more American than
that, especially with your three felonies
serving as beacons to alert anybody
of your reckless ambition. That woman
beside you is the kind of thing fools
don’t even dream about in prison &
she lets you hold your boy while voting,
as if the voting makes you & him
more free. Sometimes, it’s just luck.
Just having moved to the right state
after the cell doors stop
clanking behind you. The son
in the arms of the man was mine,
& the arms of the man belonged
to me, & I wore that Nat Turner
T-shirt like a fucking flag, brown
against my brown skin.
EXILE
No letters distinguish my father’s name
from my own. No signal for the mailman, the postman,
my employer. The man before them is me
& not what happens after grief. We are no goldfinch,
instead a kind of crow, a murder of us looming.
An employer searching our
history would find felonies & divorce proceedings, the online
account of our background a song of tragedy & regret.
A public defender or prosecutor seeking our truth
finds a dozen men with portions of our names, variations &
fragments & records of men who’ve been called before
a judge for everything from domestic violence to traffic tickets
to something called jury trial prayer & everything I did
that landed me in all those prison cells. There is no way
to distinguish us without a birth date, as if our first breath
is a signature separating who from who. In 1960,
eight years before the King’s assassination sparked the torching
of his city, my father was born; & twenty years later, just
as crack would make my father’s home burn again, I arrived
like that man’s shadow. The room fills with us, when
I enter—our regrets our anchor, our history an echo that sounds
when I speak, the decade I now
own somehow more & more like the decades he has lost,
though, in a way, I know this is the kind of thing he’d call
. . .
bullshit on & point out that there is nothing in the cracks
& tremors & baselines of my voice that suggest the sixth-story
window he leaped from as if to test the theory of man & flight
& tattooed wings that I obsess over. & maybe he’s right,
this unwieldy path of contrition or reform or mourning we
both find ourselves walking has never been
wide enough. Still, I come from a man who’s nursed
more than whisky, meaning who’s nursed it all, from a pistol,
to a prayer, to a small child in his arms that calls
him daddy. Those revelations are the kind of story a man
who only has his own name could never own.
PARKING LOT
A confession begins when I walk into a parking lot.
Near empty, the darkness a kettle. The burner against
My skin cold like any story that ends this way.
The parking lot more of an opening than an opportunity.
The man was waiting for home, asleep in a car after
A working man’s day. Everything I know of home
Is captured by the image of a man running from
The police, his arms flailing unlike any bird you’d expect
To fly. Walking into a parking lot begins a confession.
The burner is a key & afterwards there will be no home
To find. My boots echoed against the black of asphalt.
Hours before I flashed the burner on that family, I kissed
My kid goodnight. I told a woman that I loved her.
But when has love ever been enough.
PARKING LOT, TOO
A confession began when I walked out of that parking lot.
A confession began when I walked Black out of that parking lot.
A confession began when I, without combing my hair, dressed
For a day that would find me walking out of that parking lot.
There is so much to be said of a Black man with unkempt hair:
He meets the description of the suspect; suspect is running.
I ran away from things far less frightening than the police.
A confession began when I robed myself in black. A confession
Began when I walked out of that parking lot wearing a black
Hoodie. Things get exponentially worse when a hoodie is pulled
Over my unkempt air. A confession began when I walked out
Of that parking lot Black. A confession began when I walked
Out of that parking lot a Negro. A confession begins when
That nigga walked into the parking lot. A confession begins
When that nigga & the pistol he carries like a dick walked
Into that parking lot. A confession begins when everything you
See him doing is seen as sex. A confession begins when
That nigga walked into a parking lot & drove away with everything
Belonging to that white man. A confession begins when
My mother laid up with a man the complexion of that nigga’s
Daddy. A confession begins when my mother births a child
In a city close enough to make me & that nigga almost related.
A confession begins when the police perceive us as one. We must
Be one. He could not have walked in & driven out & I walked
In & walked out on the same night & whatever gaps in the story
& slight differences in the features of our faces was just
More evidence that niggers will lie. A confession begins even if
I didn’t have the fucking car. A confession begins, my confession
Began, with a woman stitching stars and stripes into a flag.
GOING BACK
after M.M.
If I return, it’ll start with a pistol
& what happened
last night, the dark a mask that
never hides
enough. I’ll pour the last of my
drink down so fast,
I’ll choke & cough & then
think about a half dozen
Black boys sitting on crates in
what passed as woods
around the way, just behind the
landscape of apartments
where Slim told us he had
HIV. If I go back, I’ll
> be thinking of him, and how he
shot the clerk in the
7-Eleven during that robbery, killing
a man because
he was dying. When Fat Boy
learned Slim had that shit,
as we called it back then,
knowing no better than us,
he wrapped
Slim up in a brother’s
embrace. It changed how I saw the
world. If I return,
the past that I pretend defines me
will not explain the old
feeling of cuffs that capture
my hand’s ambition. A sheriff’s
car will take me down I-95, &
I’ll tell myself the first time
I went down south was to go to
prison. All of my legacy
will be in my head, rattling
around in that four-door sedan
with the fucked-up suspension. I’ll
ride through my memories,
will feel time constraining my
dreams. Returning will
take me through what’ll feel like an
entire state filled with cities
named after prisons. My
birthdays of yesterday will
become the water that my head
struggles to break
through. & if I dared mourn &
say a prayer, but
nah, I wouldn’t mourn or say any
prayers.
IN CALIFORNIA
TEMPTATION OF THE ROPE
The link between us all
is tragedy, & these so many years
later, I am thinking of him,
all of twenty & gay &, maybe, more
free than any of us might ever be,
& this is one way of telling the story,
another one is aphorism, or threat:
blood on my knife or blood on my dick;
which is to confess: surviving that young &
beautiful & willing to walk every day
as if wearing sequins meant believing, always,
there is a thing worth risking doom.
There is no reason for me to think of him
now, especially with the football player’s
hanging body eclipsing another prison
cell, except, maybe the kid whose name
I can’t remember but walk I can, had mastered
something the dead man’s singing legs could
never, how not to abandon the body’s
weight, & how to make the body expand,
to balloon, to keep becoming, until even
. . .
the danger could not swallow you.
One day I watched him, full of fear for
my own fragility & wondered how he dared
own so much of himself, openly. For all
I know every minute in those cells
was safe for the kid whose name
I cannot recall. But how can a man ever
be safe like that, when you are so
beautiful the straight ones believe it &
want to talk to you as if they love you
& want you to dare them to believe
that some things in this world must be
too lovely to ever be broken.
BALLAD OF THE GROUNDHOG
—where cities get lost to time,
everyone knows the groundhog’s story,
a wild animal caged, a climb cleaved,
the beast transformed into something gory,
a caution or a flag or just inevitable.
They say he almost flew, catapulted
before the rest happened. Anviled
by the metal fence, cast as freedom’s insult
in this county where states still turn
men into numbers. There’s no city
where I can feel free. Time is fucking
inconsolable is what I mean, a starved sea
& sometimes there is nothing—just
days & their ruthless abundance.
By the time I heard the woodchuck’s
tale, I’d been returning to prison as penance,
circling black holes that turn the barren
lands dense: avenues & alleyways
buried inside sadness of castaways
lost to the clink. Who prays
for the groundhog? The Cut
is a landscape of cells dug into red dirt—
Who with a state number outruns
the fate of red dirt? The rodent’s hurt?
. . .
I owe my ears a debt for this burden.
The groundhog believed in
escaping the steel bars around him.
Home was gleaming metal, the linchpin
of shackles & handcuffs. Who
wants to awaken to that spring?
When I ask my cousin, who knows
more prisons than cities, he’s calling
the Cut a fucking deathtrap, as if
he knew the beast. The groundhog
a legend & caution. & Janis Joplin might
have been right, but for the epilogue:
the marmot, small-eared rodent, lost
everything; eclipsed, like all wild
things aching for release. The fence
tempted; one afternoon it exiled
the wobbling-near-leaping thing
with saw-teeth sure to haunt.
A groundhog, rabid animal, any human
entangled in razor wire, wants
to be more. We all, when held
that way, will struggle, twist the blades’
edges deeper. & so shanked
on a spiraling cosmos, the serenade
. . .
of the grass rat became a story
we all know. When the fence’s tines
grab hold, they will embrace like prison
strangles anyone doing time—
& this is true, whatever the
groundhog’s fate. Maybe men ain’t
as wild as we think. & no one
came to cut the whistle-pig free.
NOVEMBER 5, 1980
I have called, in my wasted youth, the concrete slabs
Of prison home. Awakened to guards keeping tabs
On my breath. Bartered with every kind of madness,
The state’s mandatory minimums & my own callus.
I’ve never called a man father; & while sleep, twice
Wrecked cars; drank whisky straight; nothing suffices—
I fell in love with sons I wouldn’t give my name. Once
Swam at midnight in the Atlantic’s violence,
Under the water, rattling broke the silence. I cussed
Men with fists like hambones & got beaten to dust.
Buried memories in my gut that would fill a book.
I’ve carried pistols but have never held a bullet.
There is frightful little left for me to hold in fear,
Definitely not the debt that threatens to hollow
Me. I’ve abhorred transparency, confessed to so-and-so,
But what of it matters, in this life so much has troubled,
& the few things that didn’t, never failed to baffle.
& EVEN WHEN THERE IS SOMETHING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT
There are those who fuck,
whose bodies collapse into yearning.
This is in the middle of all anger,
the sweat glistening, the moans
become something primal. The first
time I felt like I owned something,
she was moaning in my ear
as if I was more animal than man.
Caught in the precipice. She says,
fuck me like we just met. & she means,
like all of the shit that is ruining everything
hasn’t happened, she means when we
thought how we joined together
augured some mythic kind of joy.
& yes, this is the
fantasy, wanting
to be wanted. She called me hers
as if the state didn’t already have claim
to most of me. So sincere, that kind
of want, when talk verges on orgasm.
But I was uncomfortable with my own
hunger, & how it cascaded into
this thing that left me empty & her wanting.
MURAL FOR THE HEART
Tonight is not for my woman, who would touch me
before we speak; not when the accumulation
of our yesterdays hang like the last dusk before us—
each memory another haunting thing. Not when buried
somewhere behind us is all that the past, that we,
will not let die, history our prophecy & albatross, the myth
we measure the marrow. Every story worth telling
has a thousand beginnings. Let me tell you this one:
There was this one night on a road trip. She, my wife, was not
there. Already rehearsing my absence, practicing the dance
of raising boys alone. Distance our disaster. & so, if I say
the trouble began when the car stalled, I would be lying. But
the car did stall, every light inside flashed as if
the emergency was something breaking inside of she & I,
& not just an empty tank. Everyone wants a chance
to be a hero, & so, when I climbed out the truck’s front seat,
already I had measured the distance from the truck to the station.
A thousand feet. I once lifted my woman & carried her
on my back from where we stood to the bed that I would turn
into what remains when lies become shrapnel. Have you seen
a man push his body against a thing as if love alone
would move it? That night there were three of us riding. My
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