along the tracks outside
of our emptying apartment,
either swallowed by a sprawling city
or being coughed out of it,
the windows shook & one night
the picture of a man—
who was supposed to be Jesus
but looked like no savior
the hood would ever claim—
fell off the bookcase
& in the morning, I stepped
in the broken frame’s constellation
of glass & it might seem like
what I’m saying is that hell always comes
from above & seduces its way
south but what I am really saying
is the true daughter of desolation
is that which finds a home
inside of you when nothing else
will. the thing that burrows
& makes a way even
beyond the bone & I am fed up,
again, with the prediction
of my own misery.
Art imitates life, but particularly
the moment where flesh was broken
into once & then somehow
found a way to heal itself
again despite the body
imagining pain as a thing
of its most brutal nightmares
& I have no living mother
to call out to & so surely
you all will do for an hour,
or a night, or however long it takes
to pull from my memory
the magnifying glass
& the ants laboring beneath it
in the summer of my mother’s funeral.
A boy sets insects on fire first
& then walks from a home’s charred ruins
smelling of ash. A boy forgets
how he can feel pain first
& then shovels broken glass
into his mouth
with his bare hands
& the blood runs
from his lips & each drop
becomes a cardinal,
state bird of every place
where he misses someone.
O Jesus of a beard
that looks like my father’s beard,
Jesus of gold chains
& a tall white tee,
Jesus of braids, rowed back
along the scalp by a thin-fingered
& long-nailed sage:
grant me the mercy
of a bed in which
I do not tangle my limbs
with anyone else’s.
Grant me a cardinal that sees
its reflection in the window
of my bedroom & tries to break
the glass into one hundred pieces.
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
maybe all the blues
requires is a door
through which a person
can enter and exit.
every god hides their eyes
behind a blue hood.
the hooded devil waiting
at the crossroads
doesn’t give a fuck
about the women
who sent a man wailing
with a guitar case on his back.
it isn’t loneliness if enough tongues
have your chorus jumping
from underneath their hooded
ruckus. maybe all the blues requires
is a person who has been touched
before & a caravan of hands
busy with their own pleasures.
if you can’t fashion a song
out of that, there is no god
or devil that could make something
of your soul anyway. a father stands
over his crying son & hisses
I’ll give you something to cry about
as if he didn’t already
bring a child into a world
that requires neither of them.
FOR THE DOGS WHO BARKED AT ME ON THE SIDEWALKS IN CONNECTICUT
Darlings if your owners say you are / not usually like this / then I must take them / at their word / I am like you / not crazy about that which towers before me / particularly the buildings here / and the people inside / who look at my name / and make noises / that seem like growling / my small and eager darlings / what it must be like / to have the sound for love / and the sound for fear be a matter of pitch / I am afraid to touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo / there is a difference / between burying a thing you love / for the sake of returning / and leaving a fresh absence / in a city’s dirt / looking for a mercy / left by someone / who came before you / I am saying that I / too / am at a loss for language / can’t beg myself / a doorway / out of anyone / I am not usually like this either / I must apologize again for how adulthood has rendered me / us, really / I know you all forget the touch / of someone who loves you / in two minutes / and I arrive to you / a constellation of shadows / once hands / listen darlings / there is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise / I will not beg for you to stay this time / I will leave you to your wild galloping / I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
drake said y’all better not come to my funeral
with that fake shit. & this is how i knew
he’d never slept on a floor by way of his loneliness
& empty pockets. what is neither here nor there
is that i cling to the past because in it, i had yet to know pain
& therefore i was held only by that which desired my boyish
appetite. we buried tyler & the violets i placed on his grave
were plastic & cost 4.99 at the corner store by the punk house
where we had cake on his 19th birthday & there were purple heart-
shaped petals iced into the corner of it & i am saying that i would not know
a real violet if i ran my hands across what i imagine is its silk jaw.
i would not know, even if you pulled a string of them from your pocket
& gently planted the string along my neck & said someone not here thought this
would look pretty on you. friends, the trick to this one is that i laid the plastic on the grave
that i least wanted to dig. death itself, that fake shit
i stay praying to show up somewhere.
NONE OF MY VICES ARE VIOLENT ENOUGH TO UNDO REMEMBERING
and it is troubling isn’t it
to have a reflection
that always arrives
when called despite
the steam pulling
its thick tongue
along a mirror’s edges
after I emerge unsanctified
from underneath
the raging showerhead
and it is really something
to love only the unseen
and still be finite
back in the golden era
a good bluesman
would have a memory
only as long as it took
for the last guitar note
to drown itself
in something that burned
the throat on the dance down
and I guess
that doesn’t
seem so bad
when you consider
the times
what I’m saying is
that if you’re going to die
broke you might as well
also do it alone
my great-great-grandfather
could not swim
he played guitar
for coins on the juke circuit
but never parted his lips
for the drink
and so when the yawning maw
of the Mississippi coughed out
his remains there was no other
e
xcuse for what dragged him
to the water
except for that which he didn’t
do himself the mercy of forgetting
and in all of the pictures
I have his smile
it is dark outside my window
and I see my reflection
in everything I see
my reflection in the water
yes especially the water
THE GHOST OF MARVIN GAYE SITS IN THE RUINS OF THE OLD LIVINGSTON FLEA MARKET AND CONSIDERS MONOGAMY
there is no corner of midnight where I ain’t a god to somebody & no one claps
at all the tongue’s miracles but my daddy had a pistol & knew how to beckon a moan
from its door with a bent finger & boy all the men I come from
could hunt & we all got our methods mine is bloodred suits & sweat
in between piano keys & a scream that could rock loose anyone’s chains
& there ain’t no word for this: a murder in reverse pulling the bullet
out slow & letting it dance in the sheets I’m sayin’ they was already dead
by the time I got in the room I’m sayin’ I most cherish how the headboard
whispers under the right rhythm how it sounds like two ropes
lowering a fresh casket into another dark & wet mouth
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
free love till the check comes & me & mine reach in our fruitless pockets
for the wallets we know we left at the crib next to the framed black & whites
of our divorced or widowed parents. there were hand-drawn daisies on the de la
soul album cover once & now I stay on that hippie shit, arms open the length of a day’s
eye & no one running toward them but an estate of ghosts—hand drawn
from the depths of memory all my worst enemies keep. native tongue & all that means
is I know the exact ground to which my moans owe their treacherous birth.
I know which branch of a tree will bend under a storm’s weight & offer its palms
to my begging mouth. the satisfaction in breaking a loosely-cooked egg is in the yellow
clawing its way beyond a bondage of white. there is nothing more arrogant than beauty
at rest. de la said D.A.I.S.Y. meant da inner sound, y’all & I guess that explains the insomnia.
y’all, da inner sound is the long silence between a door slamming & the kiss of a lock, which says
you will never again in your life. put that on everything. put that on the book I slid under a table
leg to stop my yolk from running. put that on any room so empty, every name inside is an echo.
I TEND TO THINK FORGIVENESS LOOKS THE WAY IT DOES IN THE MOVIES
like in the field
slow motion
the grass dying
underfoot
someone turns
to face back
right at the last minute
before the train leaves
the sun sets
all is forgiven
the flood returns
hungry and merciless and without words
speaking of words
I tell my therapist
you can’t spell
heartbreak without art
and she doesn’t laugh
but it’s true look
at how I whip my arms
in the empty apartment again
to the song
from the movie
where someone walked back
through the door
they once walked out of
look at how I keep
playing the b sides and skipping the hits
look at how I build a shrine
to afterthoughts
I know this isn’t therapy
I know that we aren’t even
friends but tell me what it meant
when as a boy
I sat at the mouth
of the gumball machines
with no quarters
in my pockets
twisting each metal diamond
and hoping for a miracle
tell me what it meant
that when the first ball dropped
my hands were not ready
and I watched it roll in slow
motion down the mall floor
until another child more eager
than I was parted
their palms like they were catching
the last living dove
tell me what it meant
that I did not weep when the child
pushed the gumball between their teeth
with their eyes on me
the entire time
tell me what it means now
that one cannot say heartbreak
without the lips
making a soft circle of themselves
at the opening of break
as they also might to beckon a kiss
is it that memory is a field
with endless graves
IT’S NOT LIKE NIKOLA TESLA KNEW ALL OF THOSE PEOPLE WERE GOING TO DIE
It is impossible to tell your saints from your sinners when a fistful of dollar bills descends on a room. It is usually a question of who is willing to go home with less blood than they brought to the party. Some of us work for our meals, and some of us eat the dead pulled from the top hat of a hunter. What I’m saying is that after I crawled out of the pit, I knew the blood on my shirt was not a child of any wound I owned, but I still wore it the way fire wears a city it is only a visitor in. If the trick is not knowing whom to trust, how am I to stop myself from turning my heart over to a man who disappears and then reappears somewhere else with the weight of fresh coins burdening his pockets? When me and my boys filled our backpacks with handfuls of candy from the shelves at CVS and walked out underneath the cashier’s stern gaze, I imagine a field of rabbits pushed their heads out of the black soil somewhere east of where the cops beat Big Mike’s ass against the metal fence at Johnson Park when he came back to the hood with enough money in his pocket to buy his mama a crib big enough to hold a proper wake. It might seem like I am preparing you for another vanishing act, but that’s not the trick either. It’s not like I can promise the return of anyone but myself, and then where would that leave you? Loneliness is the drug from which all other drugs obtain their architecture. But maybe I don’t mean loneliness as much as I mean isolation. Maybe I mean having someone waiting for you in a bed while you sit in a running car and trace another person’s name into the fogged window with your smallest finger. Father, forgive us, for we know exactly what we do. Father, forgive us, for we were dragged by our collars to the cliffs, where we watched the lightning’s jagged spine open and split a tree, which fell on a house where there might have been a sleeping family. Forgive us, for we saw what your worst intentions were capable of and tried to catch them in our hands anyway.
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
but if you’ll indulge / my worst impulses / isn’t it funny / how the white / petals of the oleander / do not render the crow / flightless / upon being swallowed / and yet / the human body / crumbles under the weight / of their softness / by funny / you may think the joke / is about the black / thing consuming a bouquet of white / ness / without falling / from the sky / in droves / but by funny I mean / I am adorning my fingertips / with white petals / and running a thumb / along the edges / of your mouth / agape with a rapturous / desire / to hoard desire is one way / of becoming a fiend / my homie / peddled white / to fiends who / took the white / peddled / into themselves / and some / did not survive / but some / I imagine / grew brief / black wings / having never felt it / I will still wish upon you / the feeling of knowing / exactly where your next high / will be born from / I do not define / the distance between sinning / and deliverance / I pedaled the white / bike / downtown / on a Tuesday / the homie got 15 / for hoarding the white / he had yet to
peddle / inside of a suitcase / his mother cried / inside of the courtroom / mad / perhaps / with the sudden descent / of feathers
IF LIFE IS AS SHORT AS OUR ANCESTORS INSIST IT IS, WHY ISN’T EVERYTHING I WANT ALREADY AT MY FEET
if I make it to heaven, I will ask for all of the small pleasures I could have had on earth.
And I’m sure this will upset the divine order. I am a simple man.
I want, mostly, a year that will not kill me when it is over.
A hot stove and a wooden porch bent under the weight of my people.
I was born, and it only got worse from there.
In the dead chill of a doctor’s office, I am told what to cut
back on and what to add more of. None of this sounds like living.
I sit in a running car under a bath of orange light and eat
A Fortune for Your Disaster Page 3