You get to rhyme about death—

Explicit lyrics, you are the pied piper
Sending children into jerk patterns and grunts
Into tunnels of smoke—

I had to get high to write this—

Your mind twists,
Gleams like lights on the bends of a night-coaster
The riders throw their hands in the air—

You get Grandmaster mantras—
And wave ’em like they just don’t care

Under your spell I can do anything

Fly girls and Hoochie Mommas, La Femme Fantabulous
Writing your phone number on their tongues

Sucka emcees can call me Sire

Indelible tattoos
The night cut on an open sentence—
You are the Alpha and the Omegaphone

The night cut and you won’t ever be alone—
Your grin of gold-plated windows

You want the exit code from the tenement, the penitentiary—
You want [beatbox beatbox beatbox]

Breathlessness

TOUCH

TOUCH

We made our own laws.
I want to be a Hawk,
A Dolphin, a Lion, we’d say

In stores where team logos hung
Like animal skins.

By moonlight,
We chased each other
Around the big field

Beneath branches sagging
As if their leaves were full of blood.

We didn’t notice when policemen
Came lighting tree bark
& our skin with flashlights.

They saw our game
For what it was:

Fingers clutching torso,
Shoulder, wrist—a brawl.
Some of the boys escaped,

Their brown legs cut by thorns
As they ran through the brush.

It’s true, we could have been mistaken
For animals in the dark,
But of all our possible crimes,

Blackness was the first.
So they tackled me,

And read me my rights without saying:
You Down or Dead Ball.
We had a language

They did not use, a name
For collision. We called it Touch.

THETHINGS- N O - ONE- KNOWSBLUES

THETHINGS- N O - ONE- KNOWSBLUES

—after Wanda Coleman

I filed for bankruptcy in the borough of luxury.
I suspect it’s time to eat my poetry.
My favorite turtleneck sweater, the green,
50% rayon, 5% cotton (rest unknown) one,

shrank in a tub of hot
bath water. A prisoner bit
a chunk out of my step-daddy’s smile.
My mamma filled

her cancer with silicone
& pity. My wife dwells in
a house of critics. I’m younger than
sugar, but older than

NutraSweet because I had a birthday in
New Orleans.
I suffer various degrees
of wistfulness.

Honey,
I guess it’s time I eat my poetry.
Cranked to ten my Walkman screams
static. I believe B.B. fingered

Lucille like the back of a pretty woman’s knee,
but no one seems to agree.
Need pecks at the latch
of my Wal-Mart wristwatch.

The lines on my palms slope like portable ex
& why graphs. Baby, I suffer various degrees of wistfulness.
I suspect my penis will
be fed to a swimming Gila

monster. Occasionally Death
calls me collect.

ARSPOETICA# 789

ARSPOETICA# 789