If you are a Quixote it’s BLACKNESS.

If you are a SixFour it’s BLEAKNESS.

If you are an Antler it’s BLACK ASS.

7. BILL REPARATION

Here’s me willing to spend no $$ It amounted to a whole lot of $$

and at the very was a wish to be all

It’s not that I wished to be so slow-legged I could die of hunger

Inside me was the echo of rap stars caterwauling “how about me”

Inside me was a trunk of house speakers that made my block (((vibrate)))

My “how did I get so fucked up” always ended with “so what”

That’s me reciting the lines I was dealt and swallowing

I didn’t love Americans but I loved America when she sobbed

touching my cheek in the darkness to see if I was crying too

(A culture of what she wanted me to think she was

versus a culture of what she wanted me to be)

8. BEEFS WITHIN A TRIBE

9. TRIBE HUNT

We called some time or another every soul’s mother

a fool and that was a reason to scrap. A six- or eight-legged

skirmish in a back lot, a whole lot of blacks. Someone

who could not hold his Bull cried, “Courage

is what cowards call cockiness!” At least I think that’s what the fool said

after I called him a fool. I can’t say for sure, I was running

with my ears turned down when he shot that little pistol overhead.

The Antlers: “cut and run”

The SixFours: “eat and run”

The Quixotes: “run down”

The Billies: “run dry”

The Spikes: “run cold”

What can you run from

that does not inevitably find you,

that you do not inevitably return to,

that does not inevitably run

from you? “Still waters run deep,”

someone said that too. Before

the creation of the word run

some people were prone to say

“I want to do what water do”

or “what rabbit do,” “what harvest do.”

The bloodhound’s paws, they fall

in the rhythm of paws. My black ear to

the ground. Boys born with the animal

gene, the night’s long legs running

behind them, and the river

draped in a movement like running too.

10. ANTLER

All of us have seen beauty pass into something else,

have seen it waiting beneath a tree until the shade breaks free

and covers it, some of us have even been covered by it,

gripped it like a lover or a machine swerving from the road

where the pines are like people buried headfirst off the shoulder,

graveyard or gridlock, the sound of a horn entering the mind,

the deer corpse crushed against a guardrail, its eyes wide