By Any Means
We are gathered here in this
studio
to interpret each others dreams
and each go home with a
translator.
I’m guessing
at how many fill this room
for the prize of knowing
a man smiling
at the same woman
I’m smiling at.
He wears a bandana that reads Sex
Pistols.
I’m wearing a T-shirt
of Malcolm holding a rifle.
We both shoe Chuck Taylors.
She stands between us
like twin Fridas
Coming From Where I’m From
A black man with a chalky white
face has his
hand in a nylon pocket. The
pocket has a hole in it.
He’s reaching for something he’s
lost. Sees
a woman with hips swinging to
hypnosis.
Aye, white woman, you know I
love you right?
He croaks, reaching with his
eyes, the blue skirt
of her business, fondling a
broken seam. This is
downtown Oakland, but I think of
Chicago and
hear a whistle. I imagine Emmett
in an open casket,
and white men with white teeth,
and the black fist
that pulled wisdom from black
gums that too
whistled for a white girl with
money—
You talkin’ to my bitch? The hoodlum croaked,
scorched by too many blunts and
Hennessey:
the bottle broke across the young
scholar’s head.
The Subterranean Homesick Negro Speaks of Rivers of the 20th
Century—or—Letter from A Birmingham Jail, Circa Nineteen N-----
Nine
you love me but
Icantstandyou
I’m horny
You
love me
but I can’t
stand you
I’m horny you love me
but I can’t stand you
And the river of love flows like
sewage
thru my bitter heart chained down
live in jail on a Friday
night. I’m in jail
because I failed and this cell is
a holding tank
full of runaway slaves –
all pimps,
dealers, ex-preachers
a million black men weeping:
“Where’s My Tape Recorder’
“Where’s My Platinum Freedom
Ring?
“Where’s My 40 acres? Where’s My Mule?”
While I’m saying: “Where’s the
love?”
Baby – you live in the
honey comb of my heart,
but since I’ve been locked up,
I’ve been dreaming of trees
adorned with overripe
black male jewelry
when I should be dreaming of you
and us
cause you’re all I got.
I remember how we’d kiss in a
deep panic
every Kwanzaa
until the lather of eggnog
dripped
from your sacred bush,
the only one that ever spoke to man.
* *
*
She calls me “Mario,” puts her
hand
on the small of my back, and I
don’t mind.
I call her by her name
but it comes out sounding like
“it takes two.”
She shakes my hand then, and I
enter her body.
With my thoughts, push out a kid.
In whom I‘m smuggled across a
desert
into a house
where a daughter has just been
married
and is opening presents with one
hand
while rubbing her stomach with
the other
and whispering I have a dream.
I turn to notice
what looked like a fire place
was actually an island
with “Welcome to Purgatory”
at the crook of its elbow.
The translator of my future,
white as Virginia Wolf,
steps out of her glass slippers
and into the moonlight.
Every woman in her bloodline
is blue. “The axe and the scalpel
is just fancy talk for
politicians
to please everybody at the same
time.
Like group sex,” she says.
Her whiteness like drum and bass
in a Hip-Hop trunk
shakes the lynched leaves in my
chest.
DMX is growling, I hear a pack of
hounds.
I strut my Mapplethorpe to the
window
holding it like a T-shirt
and peer through a slit between
blinds
to see what beast slouches toward
Bethlehem
but there are too many trees to
see through.
[All this talk of the middle
passage is making me thirsty]
Repeat X3
**
I went to see your grandmother
last weekend,
she’s psychic
her skin like garden soil
smolders with the composted
leaves of time.
I went to her one night
with a pocket full of rose petals
and questions about us.
She said: Once upon a time
there lived a people called _ _ _
_ _ _ _
who lived on the hustle, who
lived on the edge!”
I screamed, [“Tell me what you
see!”]
And she said, Slavery’s coming
back.
The white man says every since
civil rights
we’ve been lost. He sees us as
marketable now
and wants to put us back on the
farm.
In infomercials on BET, he’ll
tell us
ask not what your hood can do for
you
but what you can do for your
hood.
[Give up]
bilingual cars that speak
the burned rubber language of
donuts,
[give up]
zombie crack whores,
hot pants hootchies, your baggy
jeans
concealing the steel cuff marks
around the ankles,
[give up]
exclusive gated ghetto
zoos closed to the public
where muzac Blues plays in every
elevator,
[give up]
buying $150 sneakers
just to stand in line at the
welfare office,
[give up]
playing ghetto monopoly with food
stamps,
[give up]
government cheese wishes and 40oz
dreams
[and come on home]
to your straw mat in the corner
where Miss Mary Sue
gets up in the middle of the
night
yearning black meat
for her lonely white bread.
Your Psychic Grandma’s Mouth
O
bama
