Maybe the Saddest Thing

by Marcus Wicker

  I think X marks a continent of loss.

  I think the more you multiply the more you have.

  I think so much depends on personal pronouns.

  D.

  I think the inverse of history is heritage.

  I think heritage halved is power.

  I think power has varied degrees.

  I’m still thinking personal pronouns.

  A.

  I think who you are says a lot.

  I think the second person implies two sides.

  I think it says less plus less equals less.

  I think it says more plus more equals more.

  S.

  I think deducting anything adds a negative sign.

  I think the question equals more than five answers.

  I think statistics can’t fix quotes or crises.

  I think this is problematic.

  Stakes Is High

  . . . ’cause his life is warfare.

  —MOS DEF AND TALIB KWELI

  You know those people who are uncomfortable

  having a conversation at a comfortable level?

  Like, you ask Tony his thoughts on Kobe

  or the LA Lakers. And Tony responds:

  Schwarzenegger ruined their state.

  Four years in office and more debt than ’03?

  Come on, man. Fuck California.

  Yeah. So Tony’s my dad. He’s retired

  but doesn’t know it. He thinks sleep is

  death’s first cousin. Early a.m.s

  my brother and me tiptoe meandering routes

  around our house, avoiding his line of sight.

  These are the hours he tunes to AM talk.

  Reads his paper where the stakes are high.

  Two Decembers ago, my brother Brian and me.

  We’re sharing cognac sips and cigarillos

  shooting stars in a powdered driveway

  when dad breaks from the Al Sharpton Hour.

  Tracks prints to basement floor. He starts in

  on precipitation: What type of grown-ass men

  trek lines of snow through a house?

  Me and your mama raised you better than that.

  He shifts into hyperbole: When you two start

  having kids, I hope you take plenty of movies.

  Your mama and me plan to kick back—watch

  the decline of common courtesy. Then Brian

  makes a wrong move. Smiles. Says snow was

  trailed in a square. Technically a half rhombus.

  Pops leaves us. Leaves the earth: Oh, so you

  wanna joke about geometry? I hear scientists

  developed a system for tracing racist thoughts.

  Can you use your math on that?

  Someone should make a drug to kill every last

  bigot in the world. They should pump that shit

  through the faucets. Drunken laughs march Dad out.

  In what world does he live? Michigan bigots

  own bunkers. Unregistered land. And if I spent

  one summer as a survey worker, if I phoned a woman

  named Shanquita and assumed she lived in a hood,

  is that intra-racist? Is it double-back racist to assume

  you assume she was black? To assume you are not?

  Would I be exempt from the ax? Could a black poet

  fail the test? Let’s say yes. Let’s call my F a defect

  of private schooling and exclusive subdivisions.

  Let’s call my death another gulp in the throat

  of history’s tireless typhoon, spinning backward.

  The Light

  I caught it like a shard of glass catches a beam.

  How a stranger’s smile can level a man. Can light

  his sunken chest. Swell a new breath. In other words

  I was the shard who glinted your eyes. In that light

  blue halter, fifth hour, you were the poetry

  I normally ignored. Your ballpoint’s clean marks. Light

  blue, light touch against my windbag essays. That made

  you especially stunning. Made you lightening

  I had to harness, hand in hand, beneath a desk. Or

  in an unattended dark room. Tenderly, red light

  washing over us. As I did. Abruptly—telling

  you it takes the right type of girl to make a black-white

  relationship work. You loved how Common rapped “The Light.”

  I listened to him more than you. His sly anti–white

  woman rhymes never touched me. But you. You filtered through

  a magnifying glass. Warmed the cherry orchard, white

  with frost. Your light sweetened my pit. You are lightning

  crashed through his pulpit into this poem. Beaming. Yes, white.

  A gleaming ax hacked through what we were growing into.

  I was the ax. You were two syllables too many. White

  space in a wheeling sonnet. A corner I couldn’t turn

  in nine lines. But now I am mourning. Thanks to you, first light.

  Bonita Applebum

  Do I love you? Do I lust for you?

  Am I a sinner because I do the two?

  —A TRIBE CALLED QUEST

  Because you introduced me to Wu-Tang

  kung fu flicks, Five Fingers of Death

  & 36 Chambers

  over quarter candy & sweet peach Faygo

  pop on a playground bench.

  Because you held my hand

  as I cranked the boom box volume knob.

  Because you lived next door to my boy B.

  Because he slept through twelfth grade

  to the tape-recorded husk of your voice.

  Because he never graduated

  he stayed home & mostly kicked it

  with a hustler, turned third-shift grinder.

  His name was D. He lived by you too.

  B. got fed, turned out cool & normal.

  Because I nodded to your chest’s thump

  under a rocket’s trail of smoke

  strong enough to trace every porch

  couch, box spring & classroom in Kzoo.

  Your cherry gloss lingered around

  each Olde E bottle I downed.

  Because I studied you in college.

  I want you to sound bad.

  Because you are mine.

  Because I refuse to share

  let’s say you’re an overwhelming

  total body high.

  Because your mouth

  is the nectar & squish of a peach.

  Because your lips are the color

  of a flowering quince.

  You ghost-rode your banana-seat

  bike through my yard. Miss Bonita,

  I caught your bug & couldn’t kick it.

  Who in their right mind thinks they can put a stop to hip-hop, if it don’t stop till I stop, and I don’t stop till it stops?

  So wrap your cultured-up skull around this. I woke

  to a red cross stenciled onto mismatched logs

  and “The Entertainer” weeping from a black baby

  grand—each note a hound dog’s droopy ear. Hear

  me when I say, I was lost. Stranded at a teen arts camp

  so north in the UP I was hearing southern tongues.

  Some flanneled blond man trailed a finger in the air.

  Bumped cha head perdy good there. Reckon ya

  twisted that ankle on this. He aimed at my foot

  with the bottom of a snapper’s lacquered shell—

  hazy compact, reflecting a dark, faceless me. Am I

  in heaven? I asked. He cackled at that; shaking his

  bronze leather face at the wall, No, no. ’Least not like him.

  My vision steadied on a hunchback boy in a yellowed white

  tee as I rose from the cot. His erratic, thunderous sniffling

  spooked words in my throat: Is he going to be, all right?

  —Oh yeah. That there’s just my little boy, Tim.
Been

  carryin’ on like that since a babe. Just a-cryin’ and playin’

  piano that way. Go’on over and say hello.

  I joined the boy of five or six at the small black bench

  and forced a nervous smile. Timmy’s glassy blue eyes

  kept time with a wooden metronome. His pupils shrank

  and grew. Shrank and grew; dilating on each upbeat.

  What if I said he wrapped my hands around his

  wrist? Would you think me stoned as Snoop Dogg

  at a slain rapper’s wake if I told you he stared? That

  he wept and played? You think I’m talking shit.

  His pupil’s penny-size screen flashed small

  looped horrors: the snapper’s shriveled head

  lopped off with a Boy Scout knife; a muscled teen

  pissing on an old, vagrant man, drooling snuff

  on courthouse steps; the night clerk’s nose stud

  nailed to a bloody boot heel. You better believe

  I bounced; hopped toward an exit. But Timmy

  kept on playing, drilling notes into me

  like a downpour thumping a well.

  True story. The boy never left that room.

  Go ahead. You can ask me how I know.

  The Message or Public Service Announcement Trailing a Meth Lab Explosion

  The edge I’m at is eleven feet high and safer than

  the dirt lot below, where shattered glass doubles

  as ground. Three rusted-out pickup trucks

  have been outfitted with yellow steel boots

  and stuffed with flames, igniting steady gusts

  of ammonia—bodily and actual—a smell

  inextricably related to the tear ducts that also

  combusted here, and why I’m standing atop

  a single-wide eyeing punched-in mobile home

  darkness. I’m thinking

  about Grandmaster Flash. “The Message”:

  an open row of a freshly set chessboard, bleak

  beneath a pink, umbrella-donned table. And

  the two rats, fat as badgers, schlepping around

  a dog’s charred carcass is the move I will make

  to hurt you. It’s 3 a.m. I just pulled off a Nowhere,

  Indiana road to watch a trailer park smoke. A fist

  of ash like nail polish scorched with salt blasts

  me to my knees. Everything disintegrates

  from this angle. Bit by bit. Like blacktop

  sweating off layers in sun. Like police tape

  singed with flame. From this point of view

  soot cloaks stars. Even a white, grinning moon

  finds its cheekbones eliminated here. I’m talking

  about real lives and white rock rubble. Eyelids,

  pocked with reddening cinder. Noses, eroded

  and raw. I’m wondering if a face on fire

  looks the same in any city. In any hue.

  A phone rings an answering machine awake.

  The trailing silence hearkens a boarded-up

  project building. And in one great big empty

  alleyway after another, people are boxed in

  or burning up. Vanishing into thin air. Here

  I am again, sketch pad in hand, glued to this spot

  watching smoke stifle everything—white

  and black chess pieces melting in slow mo.

  The Chronic

  & the mother cops a stiff

  pull from the glass bong.

  & murky water gurgling

  in the bulb-like chamber

  is barely heard but indistinctly

  audible over Roy Ayers’s

  interstellar vibe. & smoke clouds

  the bong’s fat green neck

  & glides down the woman’s throat

  into her belly

  where it blooms into a beautiful

  exhale. Toke two

  takes the same route

  but springboards

  from the gut, splatters

  a brain cell. & in that small

  space & for nine sublime songs

  sun trickles into her thoughts.

  She thinks about hydroponics. About

  five-gallon buckets & fertilizer.

  About thousand-watt sodium vapor

  lights, pruning shears &

  the invisible hand. She considers

  the self-regulating nature

  of a marketplace. How it’s all bullshit

  & doesn’t apply to her

  life. How her insides are a kind

  of marketplace. She thinks

  about supply & demand &

  obtrusively marked state lines.

  About how people are never this way.

  How our states are so rarely

  pronounced. The way we’re always

  passing through this & that

  in the supermarket or Laundromat &

  without batting an eyelash.

  She contemplates clam chowder.

  How it costs a buck

  but triggers New England

  Xmas morns, gifts netting

  her childhood & the bed

  of a pickup truck—

  a man’s hand hooking her throat.

  She thinks about dirt roads &

  green, green grass. The number

  of yards crossed

  to put a ziplocked smile

  in her hands. & it doesn’t

  matter what’s bothering the woman.

  It’s heavy. & back in the room

  her two little boys are laughing &

  zooming toy cars along carpet

  or coiling springy phone cords

  around their necks. & good

  or bad those kids are learning something.

  Some states are harder to access

  every year. & the mother could just

  as easily be a father. & down

  the block & around the corner & in

  double-wides & mansions

  this is happening. & these people sit

  inches from your cubicle.

  They teach in your schools & sing

  in your choir. Make your lattes

  & dental appointments. They walk

  your streets & sleep in

  your bed. & on & on & on. &

  sometimes these people

  are you.

  The Break Beat Break

  originates from “Break Beat.” As in,

  the faithful kick drum ride cymbal solo pattern

  that never fails to unlock a host of holy ghosts

  in any B-boy with a pulse. As in, James Brown.

  Anything by James. As in, the “Amen Break”—

  six seconds of a liquored-up Gospel B-side.

  The break in Break Beat Break comes from you.

  It is part of our collective audio unconscious.

  A pause for the cause. The cause being the body’s

  never-ending addiction to movement, which, spun

  backward on a turntable, would reveal a link

  to thought. It happens on a deserted island

  of a song, when a funky-ass fault line rips through

  your bass-induced Buddhist empty state and you

  start thinking, Damn. What breed of human am I?

  What type of man walks around with rhythm rattling

  the trunk of his dome? And wherever you are you run

  to the closest piece of light-reflecting glass, say Oh,

  that’s right, I do. You become a drum-dumb addict

  and never recover. You let the Break Beat break

  into your closet. Headphones on, you nod toward

  high-water cords, think Yeah, that’s me.

  My walk alone could make tight pants fit.

  You bounce to the bathroom absentminded, brush

  teeth with Break Beat Breaks. They start

  looking like moldy gold fronts, and you say

  Yo, this yellow is classic! An unfilled cavity.


  You’d gladly crumble a break into a blunt

  wrapper, roll it up, and smoke if you could

  keep that mighty Midas-high in your body

  for even thirty days. Baby, when the break starts

  knocking everything you think turns to music.

  And dancing never felt so motherfucking right.

  Notes on Beats, Breaks & B-Sides

  “Ars Poetica in the Mode of J-Live”

  Composed in the mode of J-Live’s “It’s Like This, Anna.”

  “When faced with the statement ‘there are more black men in jail than college,’ I think Order of Operations”

  Title remixes the following lines from Showbiz and A.G.’s “Runaway Slave.” “Nine out of ten are black on black crimes / Four out of nine were killed before their prime / The other five wanted vengeance / So now five out of five are doing a jail sentence.”

  “Stakes Is High”

  Title samples De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High.” Epigraph samples Black Star’s “Astronomy (8th Light).”

  “The Light”

  Title samples Common’s “The Light.” Poem alludes to lines from Common’s “Hungry.” “Downtown interracial lovers hold hands / I breathe heavy like an old man with a cold can of Old Style.”

  “Bonita Applebum”

  Title and epigraph sampled from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum.”

  “Who in their right mind thinks they can put a stop to hip-hop, if it don’t stop till I stop, and I don’t stop till it stops?”

  Title samples J-Live’s “Longevity.”

  “The Message or Public Service Announcement Trailing a Meth Lab Explosion”

  Title samples Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.”

  “The Chronic”

  Title samples Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the editors of the following journals where these poems appeared, sometimes in earlier forms:

  Anti- / “The Break Beat Break,” “Self-Dialogue with Marcus”

  Beloit Poetry Journal / “Maybe the Saddest Thing,” “The Message or Public Service Announcement Trailing a Meth Lab Explosion,” “Who in their right mind thinks they can put a stop to hip-hop, if it don’t stop til I stop, and I don’t stop til it stops?”

  Boston Review (Online) / “Stakes Is High”

  Cave Canem XIII / “To You”

  The Collagist / “The CEO of Happiness Speaks,” “To You”

  Columbia Poetry Review / “Love Letter to Dave Chappelle”

  Crab Orchard Review / “Some Revisions”