by Amiri Baraka
Go away & try to come back. Try to return here. Or wherever is softest, most beautiful. Go away, panderer. Liar. But come back, to it. Those high wire fences. The brown naked bodies. They turned or hurt or walked or pronounced my name. Does the word “foots” mean anything to you? She would say. Before she got skinny and died. Before that colored girl wept for her. Her false screams among the buffets, the dingy saturdays of her lovers.
What is left. If you return? You deserve to find dead slums. Streets. Yellow houses near the tracks. Someone’s mother still dying with an oil lamp. Hillside place.
They would know what to say. Even now. If they weren’t afraid. Of myself. Of what I made myself. The blue and orange hills. Red buildings. He wd know, even in the hall, bent over money on the floor. Blues singer. Thin Jimmy with tugged up pegs. Headlight, does that word mean anything to you? Separate persons.
Kenny got old. My sister. The street. The garbage. Or the black walls & illiterate letters. To continue from that. Don’t look. Don’t go back there. You are myself’s river. Blue speech. Kenny got old, I tell you. Don’t go back. Look out the window. The television whines on their christmas. They thot I was rich. I thot the hall was dark. The light fixture shd have been fancier. I was not good to look at. smart tho. They thot I was smart, too. They expected something like this. These shadows.
Bubbles, does that mean anything. Artificial or not. Saturday or not. My birthday is Easter in church if I can get dressed up. Don’t say it. That my suit will not be new this year. It’ll be clean tho. It’ll be gray covert cloth. It’ll be pink & gray. It’ll be short brimmed. It’ll be a reservoir. A view of ourselves. Not as little boys. Men. Intelligences. Super Heterodyne Expensive radios. Zippers. Blue men like my father. Like those associations
The playground is old. Kenny is old. Headlight is old. I am not. I came back to see them. I am in a black room with my new shoes. The two women stare at me and the shoes. I am drunker than their world. They do not even hate me. They are amused. I am drunker than their seasons.
The Flatterers
.284, a good season. In the sun. In hell, my head
so much sun, and cold for this month. Cars too,
squealing at the clocks. Gone past. These hands,
the metal burning night / are pictures, dreams, cousins.
A good season. Lost, the dust settling. On water, cobblestones, porches. We sat there staring at the blue street. The restaurant. My lovers’ drums. Heaps of night. “You are a young man & soon will be off to college.” They knew then, and walked around me for it.
Tough fat poet hung in the custard store. A marine. The silent brothers. Huge slick hands. They all had. Except fat awkward William / eyes were flowers. Bellbottom pants. Slate buildings.
“The woman that ran the place was a grouch, & you had to stand up with the cold wind blowing on your back. Her husband, I think, was a postman . . . like my father . . . but darker & more from the south.”
Down low for the dirt. For the hands touch. The backs of the hands, dug in the dirt. Straight at you. On tar, in those low fences. Murderers loose in the buildings. A severed head, bloody in the winter. Near anthony’s house & those other guys . . . The Buccaneers. But later, summer, it bounced right & he swept it up, wheeling in the air to throw it toward first. They were tough.
Or, the air, again, cold sun, wheeling, with hands strained, sun full in the eyes, up & around, the ball leaving, toward the squat shade homes, they yelled. They yelled, at me. The ball rolling out. Amazed, they loved it. Even the weather. Our sweatshirts, and Ginger strolling on the tar toward the jews. (Who got locked in the bread box. With the cakes? The same place used to stink the windows up. Frozen bums peeing through the windows. For cupcakes. Jelly donuts. Adventure. We laughed about it.)
She looked at my legs. They had grease on them then, when I wasn’t at the clock. The quick fingers & fear at cripple tommy, the hero of the projects. William cd beat me, for sure. In that big big gym I hid from my thighs. Too long. Strong gripping fingers.
What else. Lefty? You cd catch him in that park. More days strung out. Time & sun. He laughed about it himself, when those two bears waited outside the stadium. “Lenora sd that you were hers. Is that true?” Jo Anne. She got pregnant & somber. Like today, near father’s hotel. Divine. The doctors lived near there & one of my dianes. Diana, really, & her tall dark mother & drunken aunts. That was like cellars. That smell, & big cars to boot. Her father was white & died old with a big mustache. She wanted to make it with him, & was afraid I did too. She wouldn’t fix the phonograph where my picture was. What did that photo look like? (I think I had a german bush then. Not as large as that time in Orange watching the fags dance. His hair was red & mine stylish. My mother sat close to me watching my sister die. She really did later, when I was away. She sent me letters begging me to help her. Help her.
Beverly was my size & that started it. In the slums. Even we called them that, but all my later friends lived there. Behind those metal fences, for the playground. I never went there much, or only at night, to dance, & walk that fat girl home. They were all hip & beautiful. Even now, coming to strange things. Like this mist pushing off the day, Strange. These strangers, are beautiful. Be wary of them.
The woman liked me. Smart kid, she told everybody. I was fucking Beverly a little bit. The head of my dick went in, but I learned later to put my legs between hers, & that made it easier. She smiled when she found out. In that wet cellar.
Spots. She never really was happy. Maybe / at the proctors with me because it was dark & she could laugh at stupid things. I killed her. She let me do anything because of it. Eat her years later when I learned. Too late then, she kept calling. Believed me dead or in “Porto Rico.” I came back furious with her chimneys. Her father was right. After all.
Can you plunge into the woods? Lying by the stoop. Sell those gas heaters. Cook that food. Clean that building. Go to church.
Do you really think you were sane always. What about that powder-blue suit. Or dry-fucking Dolores Dean in your grandmother’s house. Dolores Dean, and her less fortunate baby, Morgan. Big belly. Calvin Lewis did it.
He cdn’t really play, I bet. I know pinball cdn’t. Garmoney loved me. He got fat & forgot who I was. Hauling boxes. Bowling.
Playmaker. Strange for him to say it. At Robert Treat? The Boys’ Club. Some obscure move with the hands. Across from Diane. Blacker, less desirable earlier. Grew huge in my eyes after all that killing. (Murdered my mother, father, sister, all the grandparents & uncles. Stepped out of their bloody flesh, a sinister shadow waiting for hardons.) She thought she could handle it, but it drove her crazy. She got educated & learned to make artificial birds. Another father for me, then. Blacker, too, less desirable. He walked her, on his wedding day, to the roof, & made her take off her skirt. He told me later drugged & dying.
“Anything you want Miss Sweeney. Big-eyed Miss Sweeney.” “She Got Some bigass eyes.” Ora Matthews. William Knowles (after he climbed the gas-pipes & began drumming like Elks on the desk), Murray Jackson. The Geeks. Miss Mawer, also, but better. Crippled lady. What wd she say now. Suck my pussy, hero. Eat me up.
You left that. But the cold is back. The hard gravel. Dorothy Bowman. Donald Pegram. Don’t limit the world. It grows. It bulges. It is bleeding with your names, your soft fingers.
Who do you think you are on that couch with the lights off? Her father? Her porch? Her long street behind the railroad tracks? You are a train. Her father’s noise in his sleep, of the south, from his eyes, under the weather, for you. Separate, again. These radios.
In the dark, she was soft. In the cellar. In the bedrooms. On the couch. Even with my mother’s voice. My mother. My aunt frightened of the girl because they were both ugly. My aunt Gottlieb. Oh what an ugly church that ugly girl goes to. My grandfather had died in a warehouse full of election machines. Does that mean it was Autumn? Or that I wore badges or made it with Aubry at Belmar. Aubry who?
They all turn out good. I did. The way this
is going. Who? Go back. Turn. The door will swing open into sun. Into Autumn. Into the cold. Into loud arguments at night with the door open. Small children die. I kill everything . . . I can. This is This. I am left only with my small words . . . against the day. Against you. Against. My self.
The corner is old. Headlight, bubbles. Now. Look for the lies. Them now. They go away, these lovers. For my running. Those soft flies over the shortstop’s head. Please. Not as a dead man. Even Diane. A fair second baseman. You let him die. No. The lies. No.
(Have they moved out of the city? I mean her tall beautiful mother & no good boyfriend)
Good field
No Hit!
Simonists
Again, back. Dancing, again. The portions of the mountain under light and shade at noonday. Cf. Purg. iv. “When it is 3 p.m. in Italy, it is 6 p.m. at Jerusalem and 6 a.m. in Purgatory.” Musicians crowd down the streets. Belmont Avenue, hung in front the hotdog store. The poet winds. Wine store, paint store. Buford & his brother. The National, more boldness.
Darkness. Shadows, the brown flags fold. Blue windows. Placards with large-lipped women. Lovers. You have a checkered swag, now cool it. Down the stairs. Pause on the stoop, to look both ways. The King of the Brewery tilted under night. A hill, for air, and my space. To Norfolk Street. The fag’s boundary, they had a limit. Don’t turn me over, please turn me over. Each his own area. of registration.
Beating them, in that bare light. He was humped over & his head bleeding. The lights bare, as his face. Bleeding. Simonist, thrown down from second story. They’re dancing. The girl w/ wet clothes. A white girl in a rumba suit. A line of negroes waiting. To dance. Dis. The mirrors were blue, for her wedding, she slept on the roof. Jackie Bland & his band. Nat Phipps & his band. Magicians, falling from the heavens. Naked in the park. She had a blonde streak and weighed 5 stone. Lips. Hands. An alto saxophone. She walked into rooms. She knocked at yr door once you knew her. She drove a truck. Down the mountain.
Erselle sits there. Across, from you & the curled hair. He cd dance in that small room. A basement with sewing machines, and that was proper. His prognostication, in the shadows of the jungle gym was a leather jacket & lips swollen so bad he spit out yr name from the side of his mouth. Girls & hats. Those blue felts with gray bands. Bricks & garbage hands, across town. She stood there in the dark & waited for your fingers. My fingers. “Don’t hurt me, please, just don’t hurt me.” Cross town. I cried, because we left. My overalls. My red shirt. My knickers. My picture like some wife years later in a coffee shop. Dressed in black. It was that easy because he was a musician. To say “She looked like a little mouse.” That was me, tho. He didn’t say anything, he just shut right up & told people I lied. I believed him, standing in front of the Italians, & felt sad at the season.
Dancer. That was something too. Whistling. You want to be noticed. She asked you that question & made things come together. From whistling, things you danced to. Teddy & his golden boys. Spanish names. Their own women to line up, under that glaring light. The only light then. Dark, for them, now. They disappear. Under leaves? under words. Complete darkness, to penetrate. Your fingers are soft enough. But it’s cold here & I keep my hands in my jacket.
Simoniacs, Simonists, Bolgia academic brown leaves.
3. The dancers. Mandrake, light suede shoes. Magic.
The Diviners
Gypsies lived here before me. Heads twisted backward, out to the yards, stalks. Their brown garages, stocking caps, green Bird suits. Basil suits. 15 feet to the yard, closer from the smashed toilet. Year of The Hurricane. Year of The Plague. Year of The Dead Animals.
Existent. This is Orlando Davis, who with his curly hair & large ass, steps thru mists everywhere. They caught him stealing on his scooter. They, the cops(?), moralists dropped on him from the skies. The music: Rachmaninoff’s 3rd piano glinting. Remarkable thick weather he moved thru. Not as a woman this time, a sultry male. He looked tired, or bewildered. And they mobbed him at the river’s edge, yelling their faces at heaven.
John Wieners is Michael Scott, made blind by God. Tears for everything. The fruit of his days in the past. Is past, as from a tower, he fell. Simon, dead also. Under various thumbs, our suns will pass.
This is past. Ourselves, under the earth. She made to get away. Thru Lorber’s window, we passed ourselves. They were, in all, with me: Arlotta, Strob, Starling(?) and someone else. At the same point, I leave to blaze in the elements. It was a labyrinth. Windows, broken glass in brown weeds. You kicked them as you walked, or rolled heavily if they threw you down.
Sitting across a river, they had fixed themselves with tender faces. Years later I place my fingers on their running skulls.
If anyone ever lived in a closet, it was me. There were tracks, streets, a diner, the dark, all got between me and their strings. “You’re going crazy . . . in here with dark green glasses and the light off.” It was a yellow bulb tho, and it all sat well on my shoulders. Vague wet air thrashed the stones. It sat well, without those faggots. Or ART, 5 steps up, in a wood house: a true arc.
That, and don’t forget the canopied bed. The ugliest green draperies dragged and hooked across the bed. Action as completeness. If I hung out the window, it was warm and people watched.
A guy named powell who is a lawyer. Air pushing. Straight stone streets. A guy named pinckney who is a teacher. (Place again, those fingers, on my strings. Walk in here smiling. Sit yourself down. Rearrange your synods, your corrections, your trees.
Dolores Morgan, who had an illegitimate child****
PROSPEROUS
Calvin Lewis, who gave it to her**** PRIDE
Think about that: Michael at a beach, in the warm tide. The figures I saw were fucking. “Huge” shadows, sprawling open their cunts.
Big Apple (myth says) knocked down a horse, split open a basketball player’s skull.
For him, let us create a new world. Of Sex and cataclysm.
The rest, let them languish on their Sundays. Let them use shadows to sleep.
* * *
There was a pool hall I wondered about, an ugly snarled face, Jacqueline, money was no object for her probable Saturday walks. There were a few trees to circle, the pool hall, and slick Eddie. Also (because Eddie was only a later example) the first Hipster. Not Tom Perry in the chinese restaurant. Earlier(?) and in the sun. Saturday morning. It wd be cold & I was learning then to grow tired of the days. Special. I was layed out so flat, and lied, and loved anyone who’d cross my path. A few showed me unbelievable favor. A redhead maid with heavy lips. Worked for an exceptionally respectable faggot. Lived, with some ease, across from the beer barons,
IT WAS HERE THAT THE GOLDEN BOYS FLED UP THE SREETS OF ROMANCE. HERE THAT THEY MADE THEIR HEROIC STAND AGAINST ME, ONLY TO SUCCUMB, LATER, TO MACHINATIONS DRAPED ACROSS THE WORLD. HERE, THEY THREW HANDS UP. AS IN CONQUEST, OR FINAL UGLY SUPPLICATION.
REVERE THE GOLDEN BOYS & ALSO LOS CASSEDORES. THEY TRIED.
* * *
You can never be sure of the hour. Someone stands there blocking the light. Someone has his head split open. Someone walks down Waverly Ave. Someone finds himself used.
This is high tragedy. I will be deformed in hell.
Or say this about people. “They breathed & wore plaid pedal pushers.” Can you say from that, “I told you so. Look at him, A bebopper.”
“Lefty is pretty hip,” he said to get me in. To the fag’s house. Blonde streak. The Proctors, all interchangeable in the fish truck. Myth shd be broad & rest easily in branch brook lake. It shd rest like the black trestle between Baxter Terrace & The Cavaliers. (Some slight people thot that we, The Cavaliers, were the same as The Caballeros. Some other nuts thot that we were their (The Caballeros) juniors. We came long before them, but they were older and knew all about sex (so they influenced the crowd). We were still mostly masturbators.
Charlie Davis married Dolores Davis. (He cd do a lot of things tolerably well. Third base. 12 pt. basketball game before he got replaced. That was a blow.
Beau Furr was much better, but he came from the slums & I knew him very obliquely (except that time he threw me all those passes & Big John said I’d grow up fast & tricky & “be a bitch.”) And some of it was wasted on Peggy Ann Davis, i.e., that long weave down the sidelines (abt 45 yards)
PAYDIRT IS THIS:
Ray Simmons, shy & bony, will work in commercial art houses & revere me all his life. (Enough of his missed layups!)
Sess Peoples (it got thru to him, somehow, he sd “Stoneface,” “Emperor,” “You little dictatorial fart”) as dark as he was & embarrassed by what he smelled on my clothes, Give the World. Let him march thru it in September giggling thru his fingers.
(Advanced philosophy wd be more registrations. Get more in. Deep Blue Sea. I, myself, am the debil.
A RANKING OF THE CAVALIERS IN THE ORDER OF THEIR PREPONDERANCE: (Ray & Sess done formal, as they are, floating in for the easy dunk.)
Leon Webster (came later, after the decay. My head gone, in new gray flannel suit (Black wool a nigger called it). Away, so far away, wings melted. Rome, if you want metaphor. Use Rome, & Adams calls the turns. The Barbarians had come in. The cultivated & uncultivated alike. Sprawling thru the walls.) Suffice it to say he came from real slums & was as harsh as our enemies.
Morris Hines: As a compact, years ago under the shadows of those gray or brown buildings. Always heavier than his movement. Escape Bolgia in a buick. Left-handed first baseman: “Ingentes.” Flatterer, even as whore Beatrice had her prediction, her Georges Sorel. We had our church. Sussex Ave. was rundown & all the negroes from the projects went there (the strivers after righteousness. American ideal, is not Cyrano’s death on Lock Street. The poor went to Jemmy’s church, but big Morris and his deacon father sat next to Joyce Smith’s house every Sunday & their mother wd fan God. Malebolge (for the flatterers) for me, there is all you can imagine. Jehovah me fecit.