When I called out to the old man as he walked away,

I swear he was singing Whatever, whatever to himself.

God hardly listens when we talk anyway. After spells

Of nothing sometimes I go Shedeadshedeadshedead

To myself because that‘s how I pray. If you’re a church,

Dear Lord, you’re less than stained glass to me.

I want to take a hammer, I want to hammer, I want

To take a hammer to the mirror on your smallest toe.

Because, eureka, a little prayer don’t doctor shit.

I can almost imagine the look of your scars,

Dear Lord, when I find you.

A. MACHINE

Hey, I am learning what it means to ride condemned.

I may be breaking up. I am doing 85 outside the kingdom

Of heaven, under the overpass and passed over,

The past is over and I’m over the past. My odometer

Is broken, can you help me? When you get this mess-

Age, I may be a half-ton crush, a half tone of mist

And mystery, may be trooper bait with the ambulance

Ambling somewhere, or a dial of holy stations, a band-

Age of clamor and spooling, a dash and semaphore,

A pupil of motion on my way to be buried or planted or

Crammed or creamed, treading light and water or tread

And trepidation, maybe. Hey, I am backfiring along a road

Through the future with “I am alive” skidding across my tongue.

When you get this message, will you sigh, My lover is gone?

PORTRAIT OF ETHERIDGE KNIGHT IN THE STYLE OF A CRIME REPORT: PART I

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PORTRAIT OF ETHERIDGE KNIGHT IN THE STYLE OF A CRIME REPORT: PART II

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PORTRAIT OF ETHERIDGE KNIGHT IN THE STYLE OF A CRIME REPORT: PART III

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ELEGY WITH ZOMBIES FOR LIFE

The trouble with living like thinking is feeling is it’s not

Really living. I think, for example, these are good times

Save the mornings I want to say “Shame on you mother-

Fuckers” to the motherfuckers trafficking homemade posters

Of death on the corner between my home and the cemetery

That holds among its dead the bones of the great pianist

Mary Lou Williams, the mother of jazz. Music was her child

Because she had no child. For Mother’s Day my children

And I took my wife to visit Mary Lou’s headstone (May 8, 1910–

May 28, 1981). We found it unmoored and untended,

Unattended on a hillside. People who say don’t live in the past

Don’t have a real sense of the past, would you agree with that?

Life is not about what you learn, really, but what you remember.

I was in a diner once when I saw a young mother passed out