Hardcore like the hardcore rappers paid to be

Wrapped in chains of rhyme and the arms of women

Working for men who want to fill the soft pockets

Of everything with something of themselves

A camera swelled the locks on my brother’s body

In the courtroom the way police lights swelled

Over the girls he trafficked miles for money

And taxed for gas back home and the protection

He offered them from the belligerent johns

And, when called for, protection from himself

Before the judge denied bail, the ruling

Was on the news: “Columbia man charged

With human sex trafficking,” he will live in a cell

With the beautiful solitude chained about his throat

Growing over time as permanent and illegible

As what has been scratched tooth and nail

Into the cells—the music I have been playing

All my life is about pimps and who will be pimped,

But when my daughter is listening, I play something else

WIGPHRASTIC

after Ellen Gallagher

Sometimes I want a built-in scalp

that looks and feels like skin. A form of camouflage,

protection against sunburn and frostbite,

horsehair that covers the nightmares and makes me civilized.

Somebody slap a powdered wig on me so I can hammer

a couple sentences like Louis XIV small and bald

as a boiled egg making himself taller by means

of a towering hairpiece resembling a Corinthian column

or maybe a skyscraping Kid with no Play wig

worn by someone playing N.W.A

at a penthouse party with no black people.

We up in the club humming Hmm-mmm, hey Mamma

while our numbskull caps underscore the brain’s captivity.

Somebody slap me. Norman Mailer’s essay

“The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster”

never actually uses the word wigger. I’d rather say whack.

It may be fruitful to consider me a philosophical psychopath.

We clubbing in our wigs of pleas and longing.

The ladies wear wigs of nots,

knots of nots: would nots, do nots, cannots,

wigs dipped in dye swirl on their scalps, off their scalps,

sides of scalps, their center parts, and irrigated plaits.

Flirty bangs dangle below a bow clip of sparkle.

A lady places her bow about-face to place her face in place.

Which is a placebo of place, her face is a placebo!

Let’s wear ready-made wigs, custom-made wigs,

hand-tied wigs and machine-made wigs.

“No Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty

that violence will not visit him,” wrote Mailer.

Bullets shout through the darkness. Dumb people are dangerous.

“Calamity pimps come out of the woodwork

and start to paddle their own canoes.”

This was a white dude’s response to the death of Martin.

Let’s beat that apathy wig off him.

Let’s get higher than God tonight like the military wives

of Imperial Rome smiling in the blond and red-haired wigs

cut from the scalps of enemy captives. Somebody slap me.

We awash in liquor watching the coils curl,

curls coil, coils coil, curls curl on the girls.

Nonslip polyurethane patches, superfine lace,