Isis wigs, Cleopatra wigs, Big Booty Judy wigs

under the soft radar-streaked music of Klymaxx

singing, “The men all pause when I walked into the room.”

The men all paws. Animals. The men all fangles,

the men all wolf-woofs and a little bit lost, lust,

lustrous, trustless, restless as the rest of us.

In my life the wigs eat me. The wish to live awhile on the mind

of another human is not inhuman. The wish to slide

for a while inside another human, it is not inhuman.

If you like “like” like I like “like,” you should wear a hairpiece.

It is peace of mind. It is artistic. It is a lightweight likeness,

comfortable, wash and wear, virtually looking and feeling

with virtually no side effects. Let me hear you say,

“This wig is terrific!” A colored despair wig

for your colored despair, an economic despair wig,

a sexual despair wig, a wig for expressive despair,

political despair, a movable halo. New and improved,

your wig can be set upon the older wig

just as the older wig was set,

when it was newer, upon the wig beneath it.

Where’s your wig? Wear your wig. Your wig is terrific.

MY LIFE AS A HUMMER

My life as a hummer followed my life

as a gas of complex and commonplace

observances concerning, for example,

pathos, martyrs, enemies, and ruin.

I had not visited Detroit, but I knew

the road there touched eccentrics

differently. I became a maker of sounds

as abstract as kittens in a box taped shut.

The hum had always been in me.

Where once any tune was a tongue-slapped

syllable, any tune came to be an insatiable

yuck. Whatever cannot be said

when being suffocated, can be hummed

fairly easily. I devoted myself to sumptuous

moos and hallelujahs. Look around you:

only the absence of certain people suggests

you did not sleep the whole journey.

All else is machinery that seems to be saying

“Destroy.” It makes me remember the last time

I was in Detroit I thought of jumping

through a window on a hotel’s thirteenth floor.

I felt I had fallen like a ladder into a plot

of saggy flowers. I felt like the crestfallen

letters of the Motown marquee half-spelling

the name of David Ruffin, a man born

but not buried in Whynot, Mississippi.

I fell like a letter from a sack of fan mail

declaring, “Dear David, come back to Detroit

before it is destroyed by the sound of guzzling!”

I am like anyone: truck and whatever

is run over by the truck. Ask me about hunger,

and I will hum something very unlikely.

GENTLE MEASURES1

CHAPTER I. THREE MODES OF MANAGEMENT

First, I would like to have with 196 women from the world’s

196 nations 196 children, then I would like to abandon them.

I know it’s not that easy. But when I am home, I can’t wait

to get moving, when I am moving I can’t wait to get home

again. Part of me loves when I’ve got no place to be.