Some days you say
bless God forever.
Some days, you say,
curse God, and die
and the day comes when you wrestle
with that lie.
Some days tussle
then some days groan
and some days
don’t even leave a bone.
Some days you hassle
all alone.
3
I don’t know, sister,
what I’m saying,
nor do no man,
if he don’t be praying.
I know that love is the only answer
and the tight-rope lover
the only dancer.
When the lover come off the rope
today,
the net which holds him
is how we pray,
and not to God’s unknown,
but to each other – :
the falling mortal is our brother!
4
Some days leave
some days grieve
some days you almost don’t believe.
Some days believe you,
some days don’t,
some days believe you
and you won’t.
Some days worry
some days mad
some days more than make you
glad.
Some days, some days,
more than shine,
witnesses,
coming on down the line!
Conundrum (on my birthday)
(for Rico)
Between holding on,
and letting go,
I wonder
how you know
the difference.
It must be something like
the difference
between heaven and hell
but how, in advance,
can you tell?
If letting go
is saying no,
then what is holding on
saying?
Come.
Can anyone be held?
Can I – ?
The impossible conundrum,
the closed circle,
why
does lightning strike this house
and not another?
Or, is it true
that love is blind
until challenged by the drawbridge
of the mind?
But, saying that,
one’s forced to see one’s definitions
as unreal.
We do not know enough about the mind,
or how the conundrum of the imagination
dictates, discovers,
or can dismember what we feel,
or what we find.
Perhaps
one must learn to trust
one’s terror:
the holding on
the letting go
is error:
the lightning has no choice,
the whirlwind has one voice.
Christmas carol
Saul,
how does it feel
to be Paul?
I mean, tell me about that night
you saw the light,
when the light knocked you down.
What’s the cost
of being lost
and found?
It must be high.
And I’ve always thought you must have been,
stumbling homeward,
trying to find your way out of town
through all those baffling signals,
those one-way streets,
merry-making camel drivers
(complete with camels;
camels complete with loot)
going root-a-toot-toot!
before, and around you
and behind.
No wonder you went blind.
Like man, I can dig it.
Been there myself: you know:
it sometime happen so.
And the stink make you think
because you can’t get away
you are surrounded
by the think of your stink,
unbounded.
And not just in the camels
and the drivers
and not just in the hovels
and the rivers
and not just in the sewers
where you live
and not just in the shit
beneath your nose
and not just in the dream
of getting home
and not just in the terrifying hand
which holds you tight,
forever to the land.
On such a night,
oh, yes,
one might lose sight,
fall down beneath the camels,
and see the light.
Been there myself: face down
in the mud
which rises, rises, challenging
one’s mortal blood,
which courses, races, faithless,
anywhere,
which, married with the mud,
will dry at noon
soon.
Prayer
changes things.
It do.
If I can get up off this slime,
if I ain’t trampled,
I will put off my former ways
I will deny my days
I will be pardoned
and I will rise
out of the camel piss
which stings my eyes
into a revelation
concerning this doomed nation.
From which I am, henceforth,
divorced forever!
Set me upon my feet,
my Lord,
I am delivered
out of the jaws of hell.
My journey splits my skull,
and, as I rise, I fall.
Get out of town.
This ain’t no place to be alone.
Get past the merchants, and the shawls,
the everlasting incense: stroke your balls,
be grateful you still have them;
touch your prick
in a storm of wondering abnegation:
it will be needed no longer,
the light being so much stronger.
Get out of town
Get out of town
Get out of town
And don’t let nobody
turn you around.
Nobody will: for they see, too,
how the hand of the Lord has been laid on you.
Ride on!
Let the drivers stare
and the camel’s farts define the air.
Ride on!
Don’t be deterred, man,
for the crown ain’t given to the also-ran.
Oh, Saul,
how does it feel to be Paul?
Sometimes I wonder about that night.
One does not always walk in light.
My light is darkness
and in my darkness moves, forever,
the dream or the hope or the fear of sight.
Ride on!
This hand, sometimes, at the midnight hour,
yearning for land, strokes a growing power,
true believer!
Will he come again?
When will my Lord send my roots rain?
Will he hear my prayer?
Oh, man, don’t fight it
Will he clothe my grief?
Man, talk about it
That night, that light
Baby, now you coming.
I will be uncovered, on that morning,
And I’ll be there.
No tongue can stammer
nor hammer ring
no leaf bear witness
to how bright is the light
of the unchained night
which delivered
Saul
to Paul.
A lady like landscapes
(for Simone Signoret)
A lady like land
scapes,
wearing time like an amusing shawl
thrown over her shoulders
by a friend at the bazaar:
Every once in a while she turns in it
just like a little girl,
this way and that way:
Regarde.
Ça n’était pas donné bien sûr
mais c’est quand même beau, non?
Oui, Oui.
Et toi aussi.
Ou plutôt belle
since you are a lady.
It is impossible to tell
how beautiful, how real, unanswerable,
becomes your landscape as you move in it,
how beautiful the shawl.
Guilt, Desire and Love
At the dark street corner
where Guilt and Desire
are attempting to stare
each other down
(presently, one of them
will light a cigarette
and glance in the direction
of the abandoned warehouse)
Love came slouching along,
an exploded silence
standing a little apart
but visible anyway
in the yellow, silent, steaming light,
while Guilt and Desire wrangled,
trying not to be overheard
by this trespasser.
Each time Desire looked towards Love,
hoping to find a witness,
Guilt shouted louder
and shook them hips
and the fire of the cigarette
threatened to bum the warehouse down.
Desire actually started across the street,
time after time,
to hear what Love might have to say,
but Guilt flagged down a truckload
of other people
and knelt down in the middle of the street
and, while the truckload of other people
looked away, and swore that they
didn’t see nothing
and couldn’t testify nohow,
and Love moved out of sight,
Guilt accomplished upon the standing body
of Desire
the momentary, inflammatory soothing
which seals their union
(for ever?)
and creates a mighty traffic problem.
Death is easy
(for Jefe)
1
Death is easy.
One is compelled to understand
that moment
which, anyway, occurs
over and over and over.
Lord,
sitting here now,
with my boy with a toothache
in the bed yonder,
asleep, I hope,
and me, awake,
so far away,
cursing the toothache,
cursing myself,
cursing the fence
of pain.
2
Pain is not easy;
reduces one to
toothaches
which may or may not
be real,
but which are real
enough
to make one sleep,
or wake,
or decide
that death is easy.
3
It is dreadful to be
so violently dispersed.
To dare hope for nothing,
and yet dare to hope.
To know that hoping
and not hoping
are both criminal endeavours,
and, yet, to play one’s cards.
4
If
I could tell you
anything about myself:
if I knew something
useful – :
if I could ride,
master,
the storm of the unknown
me,
well, then, I could prevent
the panic of toothaches
If I knew
something,
if I could recover
something,
well, then,
I could kiss the toothache
away,
and be with my lover,
who doesn’t, after all,
like toothaches.
5
Death is easy
when,
if,
love dies.
Anguish is the no-man’s-land
focused in the eyes.
Mirrors
(for David)
1
Although you know
what’s best for me,
I cannot act on what you see.
I wish I could:
I really would,
and joyfully,
act out my salvation
with your imagination.
2
Although I may not see your heart,
or fearful well-springs of your art,
I know enough to stare
down danger, anywhere.
I know enough to tell
you to go to hell
and when I think you’re wrong
I will not go along.
I have a right to tremble
when you begin to crumble.
Your life is my life, too,
and nothing you can do
will make you something other
than my mule-headed brother.
A Lover’s Question
My country,
t’is of thee
I sing.
You, enemy of all tribes,
known, unknown, past,
present, or,
perhaps, above all,
to come:
I sing:
my dear,
my darling,
jewel
(Columbia, the gem of
the ocean!)
or, as I, a street nigger,
would put it—:
(Okay. I’m your nigger
baby, till I get bigger!)
You are my heart.
Why
have you allowed yourself
to become so grinly wicked?
I
do not ask you why
you have spurned,
despised my love
as something beneath you.
We all have our ways and
days
but my love has been as constant
as the rays
coming from the earth
or the sun,
which you have used to obliterate
me,
and, now, according to your purpose,
all mankind,
from the nigger, to you,
and to your children’s children.
I have endured your fire
and your whip,
your rope,
and the panic from your hip,
in many ways, false lover,
yet, my love:
you do not know
how desperately I hoped
that you would grow
not so much to love me
as to know
that what you do to me
you do to you.
No man can have a harlot
for a lover
nor stay in bed forever
with a lie.
He must rise up
and face the morning sky
and himself, in the mirror
of his lover’s eye.
You do not love me.
I see that.
You do not see me:
I am your black cat.
You forget
that I remember an Egypt
where I was worshipped
where I was loved.
No one has ever worshipped you,
nor ever can: you think that love
is a territorial matter,
and racial.
oh, yes,
where I was worshipped
and you were hurling st
ones,
stones which you have hurled at me,
to kill me,
and, now,
you hurl at the earth,
our mother,
the toys which slaughtered
Cain’s brother.
What panic makes you
want to die?
How can you fail to look
into your lover’s eye?
Your black dancer
holds the answer:
your only hope
beyond the rope.
Of rope you fashioned,
usefully,
enough hangs from
your hanging tree
to carry you
where you sent me.
And, then, false lover,
you will know
what love has managed
here below.
Inventory/On Being 52
My progress report
concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom
is discouraging.
I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.
Furthermore, it appears
that I packed the wrong things.
I thought I packed what was necessary,
or what little I had:
but there is always something one overlooks,
something one was not told,
or did not hear.
Furthermore,
some time ago,
I seem to have made an error in judgment,
turned this way, instead of that,
and, now, I cannot radio my position.
(I am not sure that my radio is working.
No voice has answered me for a long time now.)
How long?
I do not know.
It may have been
that day, in Norman’s Gardens,
up-town, somewhere,
when I did not hear
someone trying to say: I love you.
I packed for the journey in great haste.
I have never had any time to spare.
I left behind me
all that I could not carry.
I seem to remember, now,
a green bauble, a worthless stone,
slimy with the rain.
My mother said that I should take it with me,
but I left it behind.
(The world is full of green stones, I said.)
Funny
Jimmy's Blues Page 3