You knew what freeze meant, but you’ve never seen someone frosty freeze.
It didn’t matter who was carrying, more so how long you were carried before someone decided to drop you.
THE POETRY COPS
COPS: This one looks like a DeCavara.
PAPO: That’s Nestor in the shadow. Every time the landlord fixed the vestibule light, we would blow it out, and that shadow made customers think twice about having the wrong idea. SHAKER took that flick. He used to run with ZEPHYR and those East Side Partner cats. Nice with the lens.
COPS: Who’s holding the trophy?
PAPO: That’s Tommy Lee. Goya all-star MVP. Tommy Lee used to bat cross-handed until he started playing in Central Park. Seen him turn doubles into triples, and gun down Triple-A players with a sixth-grade arm.
COPS: Is that Héctor Camacho? The fighter?
PAPO: Yessir. That’s the Macho Man himself. He used to come to the park jams, do his dale huevo rocking his gladiator helmets, war bonnets, headdresses & that dookie nameplate. Shit, that nameplate went from shoulder to shoulder for real.
COPS: The Crazy Bunch had a float at the parade?
PAPO: Something like that. We basically bum-rushed the Goya float.
COPS: Love those Afros on you guys. Must be class picture day.
PAPO: Yeah, that’s some ungawa black power right there. That’s difunto Dwight, difunto Chino Chan, Davi, Felix, and Little Eddie on picture day at P.S. 7. Afro angels playing the back row.
COPS: These two look very Jesse James.
PAPO: That’s difunto Marc and Baby Los. Check those flavors, though. That was after the Florsheim guiso. The whole Block had on fresh kicks. Even the Bruja rocked her white Royal Lo PRO-Keds: the ones with the red & blue hash on the side.
COPS: Who was locked up in this photo?
PAPO: I never understood those palm trees in the prison pics.
COPS: And this one?
That’s My Heart Right There
We used to say,
That’s my heart right there.
As if to say,
Don’t mess with her right there.
As if, don’t even play,
That’s a part of me right there.
In other words, okay okay,
That’s the start of me right there.
As if, come that day,
That’s the end of me right there.
As if, push come to shove,
I would fend for her right there.
As if, come what may,
I would lie for her right there.
As if, come love to pay,
I would die for that right there.
Sucker for Love Ass Nigga
I.
Skinicky
Jimbrowski ass nigga
That sucker for love ass nigga
The love that gives you a pound
The love that blooms & blushes
The love that sees you around
The love that scars & shushes
The love that cries the wrong name
The love that pulls the right trigger
The love that’s true to the game
The love that says, Fuck you, nigga
The love you work hard to forget
The love that likes to point fingers
The love that curses & sweats
The love that plays backup singer
The love that truths when it writes
The love that days when it nights
II.
Skinicky.
Jimbrowski ass nigga.
That sucker for love ass nigga.
He liked to be sad for fun.
Every New Year’s Eve he’d walk up and down 125th Street looking for Josephine. He would put his ear to the curb to listen for her footsteps; even walked into the 25th Precinct to see if any desk appearance tickets had been issued in her name.
He joined freestyle ciphers with everything he would’ve said, given another chance.
Brother Lo once said, Heartbreaks need corroborations, so you have to commit everything to memory, no paper.
Who had software to guarantee that none of us would crash?
III.
The rules of engagement:
Whenever you walk with your boo, make sure
she’s always on your left side, inside the curb.
Tell her how you feel, but never the last word.
Platinum, gold—they’re just medals.
Let her pedal the ten-speed sometimes.
She’ll tell you when she wants you to know.
There was nothing that included the word settle in Josephine’s style.
None of us had girls, so how to say That’s my woman.
That night, Skinicky had the nerve to pull out his black composition book.
In all of her waking language, Josephine needed to be free. She put her hand up like a crossing guard. Wait up, she said. There you go. Already putting shit in the game.
The windows were marauded by twilight, and it was a beautiful summer to be a sucker for love ass nigga. All you had to do was surrender.
Skinicky tried to hit her with some Shalamar. “It’s got to be real. Girl, I could write a book on how you’re making me feel.”
Then Josephine turned her neck and rolled her eyes. Say it right, she said. Let it all be automatic true. Don’t be shook. Don’t book. Be good in this dream. According to you, she said, I never use the right words. Can you read me now? Don’t name what it’s not, but don’t stand there and try to sky me. Ain’t that much poetry in the world, she said.
IV.
You could say that Josephine lived in a virtuous time. She had a habit of cutting you short when you came up to her and said, I’m gonna tell you something, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.
She bulleted the abuses, the excuses, the short
fuses, & then she hit Skinicky with her dream:
She saw zero, so liberation was on the menu.
Mister Softee vanilla so sweet it was forbidden.
A baguette meant bounty, so we can all eat.
A beige pair of heels told her to stay neutral.
There was a seven so her mental was on point.
A glass of water rushed to leave its solutions.
Don’t even try to open any thank-you notes here, she said. Before the lonely pays a social call, stay faithful to the bad & the wrong. Don’t worry about my heart; it’ll remember what it’s supposed to remember. Don’t forget the first rule, baby: Write about what you know.
Her last word was
Siempre,
& then she went silent like a blank piece of paper.
Two couplets later, Skinicky was back on the Block heading straight toward the Age of Fuck It, and it was true then, as it is now, that there were only a few of us holding the street down with our hearts.
THE POETRY COPS TALK WITH JOSEPHINE
COPS: Skinicky told us you were his heart.
JOSEPHINE: Papo was lying.
COPS: We spoke to a few people from Lexington that swear by it.
JOSEPHINE: In the morning you want all the bad shit to be gone.
COPS: He said you were his beautiful battle.
JOSEPHINE: Yeah, he liked that word a lot. Beautiful.
COPS: He called you a real dream.
JOSEPHINE: You know dreams are the only time you can wake up before someone pulls a trigger.
COPS: We want to hear your side, Josephine.
JOSEPHINE: When slick shows up it makes my hands sweat and I don’t do old love.
COPS: But what if it was true?
JOSEPHINE: You can’t freestyle the truth and I told him, Once you start using the word soul, you start wanting things you can’t have.
COPS: But what if, though?
JOSEPHINE: I dig it. Sometimes you have to fantasize to your favorite ifs. What do you keep to yourself just in case you have to run away?
COPS: We just want to help Skinicky. That’s all. He’s trying to remember.
JOSEPHINE: I used to ask him, What’s going to happen when the words stop working? He was always trying to spit that Gucci shit, and I don’t speak Spanish.
COPS: Can we talk about “beauty hunger”?
JOSEPHINE: Not for nothing, honestly & truthfully, when it came to beauty, some of us had empty stomachs. My uncle Joe always told me you have to watch them when they lean to talk, watch to see if they wipe crumbs off your lip. I’m not a poet, mister, but I can see.
COPS: And what was it you saw that night?
JOSEPHINE: Love is where the paper unfolds unto itself. When I’m lying, my tongue seeks shelter, the horoscopes get the shit wrong, and I don’t believe in emergency numbers. Might as well hang me on a wall and look at me all day. I pick up speed when I turn the corner.
THE POETRY COPS TALK WITH NENA, CACHITA, SHAMEKA, AND ROSIE
COPS: You girls were at the Sweet 16 when the Crazy Bunch crashed.
NENA: I don’t know where you see a “girl” in this room, mister.
CACHITA: Right?
COPS: Pardon me.
CACHITA: The whole Block was at the Sweet 16.
NENA: That’s where I met my husband.
SHAMEKA: You want to know about Petey, don’t you?
COPS: Well, yes, Petey was absent from the party.
SHAMEKA: Did you ask the streets? The streets are always watching.
CACHITA: When you get born into this world, you have to figure out why you here quick.
COPS: But we want to know more about the bodies, the deaths, the effect it had on Skinicky. He was the poet in the crew.
CACHITA: On who?
NENA: The who?
COPS: Papo.
SHAMEKA: That nigga good. I heard he’s living upstate. In the woods, and shit.
ROSIE: Whose body?
SHAMEKA: You can’t have my body. My body, your body.
CACHITA: Everybody wants my body.
ROSIE: Like you, right, mister? You born to ask questions.
SHAMEKA: And I wasn’t born to answer them. What bodies you talking about, mister?
Close to the River
The Block was on easy listening by the time we crossed the Bridge.
One could say that the moon over Lexington was sartorial. You could break the eerie down as fog without London; the light posts were holding a note, and no one was sitting on the abandoned folding chair that belonged to the community center.
There’s always a cat, but now there’s three and you swear that there’s someone on the rooftop making faces at the stars.
When you get back to the Block in the wee hours, you become guru & guide, you acquire skills in asking the right questions, you know where the ’98 Seville hood is headed, where a sign is missing, how close you were to the Spot by the small montage of red dots on a taxi’s tail.
You ponder the lull after the cheese lines have closed, and you’re left to wonder how your best customer finally hit bottom.
A pickup game picks up trash talk by the good net. Crickets & distant sirens decide to collaborate in this hour.
A leaf storm collages a backboard.
You didn’t dare question the empty shopping cart near the garbage can.
A shade swallows half the street, and the need to get paid takes over the whole body.
It was no surprise that we lived close to the river; it was easy to make bastards of our era.
On the cool side of Gaddafi’s, where the viejos sipped their Johnnie Walker nips with milk chasers, gibbous strands escaped through a missing doorknob, and two milk crates were left bottom-side-up like hints ready to be clocked.
The blood always draws a map. The longitude swirls under the icebox. The latitude draws a straight line, and you still can’t find your way.
Angel was the first to see the yellow tape. He found Nestor in a pile of what we swore to forget: left eye by his foot, bile the shade of old butter, peppermint juice running down his cheeks, a crust commandeering his eyelids & cockroaches yelling obscenities from his diarrhea.
I’ve known rivers outlining this gangster right to the gutter.
A siren splotches the street new by the second. The nooks in the sewer lids mimic a petri dish, & you could dial the hotline behind the peeled billboard.
Cover him. Fucking cover him, Angel yells from behind the yellow tape.
None of us wanted to exit this world without a sense of procession while the whole Block was watching; no matter how much we stole, no matter how much we owed.
Chino Chan started a fake fight, and drew Teddy-Up to us.
Angel took a running start and cleared the top of the tape. He dropped to his knees, shrouded Nestor’s face with a red BVD, and cried so much he almost got arrested.
Who was there to see what became of us at the touch of blood?
How It Went Down
A man walks into Gaddafi’s with a cactus on his head. This sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s not. We called him Gaddafi, but his name was Domingo. We called him Gaddafi because he looked like Gaddafi. The cactus wanted three-for-ten. When you take shorts, you can only take as much as been took, but when you’re taken, then you need to start thinking about what they’re calling theirs & what you’re calling yours. The car that suddenly pulls up is more delivery than package. More end stop than ellipsis. The Dreads sit there & perch there & chill there & lamp there & chill there & rest there, still there, word, they don’t move. Nestor let the Dreads know that nothing was happening, even though he just opened up. Petey says, I heard those cactuses never die. They say that getting shot is a scene study where all your reward circuits go blank. You only remember the blast, the smoke after the blast, the nanosecond after the smoke, and then you remember the cactus, untouched, sitting on the stoop, still, there.
Not for Nothing, Honestly & Truthfully
Like jewel thieves, we put everything to the light.
Whenever Brother Lo preambled stories with Not
for nothing, honestly & truthfully, we knew he was
lying his way into history. Stories started their
premises on the stoop, broke arcs by the time
they reached the uptown express, and the real
was played & buried by the time it got directions.
He said, It was like Petey had a lit birthday candle
sticking out his right ass cheek. The negus ran all
the way to North General. Shameka said she saw
a wisp of smoke flirting with the heat, a graph of
blood followed west all the way to triage. She
started telling stories, and hasn’t stopped since.
Petey jetted to the hospital with a slug below
his heart, a skin shot near his calf, a cap in his
ass, and don’t call it symbolic, Brother Lo told
Skinicky. A man gots to know his wrong even
when he’s turning blue. You just can’t call the
wrong witch. Before Petey went black, he saw
Nestor’s mother cry into a blanket, a calendar
with a photo of the White Mountains, a body
bent in a wheelchair, a waterfall, and an empty
plastic cup. And then, the next thing you know,
you prayed hard, but you never made promises.
When Teddy-Up Rolls
We were already trapped in fire & abandonment, allies & alliances, villains & vandals, riding the twin engines of vigil & violence; we defended the Constitution better than the Constitution defended the Constitution.
When Teddy-U
p rolled they rolled with new-world thirst.
Like a good mix, they shook the Block up & down until all the fried snitches fell out.
Embroidered the projects with scare tactics, kept their narratives consistent, checked their sources between punk & pussy, gossip & gore, and paid you to keep score.
Your thirst for aesthetics & answers begins here with a simple phrase.
Put your hands in the air like you just don’t dare. Fingers together, belowdecks together. Click, now spread. Let me see the light come through.
Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care. Who will scrub the floor with your breath plea, who will post it live, who will say, That’s not me.
Everything you believed about being good starts to make a list in your head, and don’t even start with your worldview.
Put your hands in the air like it just ain’t fair, and now it’s time for question & answer:
That was your who?
By show of hands, your relationship to freedom is what?
You said that was your boo?
Check out my melody &
Keep them up until I say different.
And the correct answer for a free—
O me me me me me
me me me me me me.
No ID
Always put a badge number to memory.
Teddy-Up’s neck blushed a Christmas red.
Teddy-Up gripped his nightstick &
his knuckles ran Christmas white.
Angel was thinking, Run.
Angel was thinking, That’s my heart right there.
Angel was thinking, Mighty Whitey don’t play fair.
Angel was thinking, Big beat big beat big beat.
Angel was thinking, Fuck the police.
Angel was thinking, I ain’t running nowhere.
I need to see ID before I let you go, said Teddy-Up.
Angel closed his eyes and said,
I’m nobody.
I don’t have an ID.
I don’t exist.
I was just walking to the store.
The Crazy Bunch Page 3