FINAL POEM FOR THE BIOGRAPHY OF A BLACK MAN AS ANIMAL AND HIS ENFORCED EMBRACE OF A HUMAN PRAXIS

Slaughter lurks in the afterpasture. Perhaps

Being being blurred in the legible demands self-

captivity: his tail whipped mind-wise

tight circles of animus, or draped, equine. Flies

decorate the wake of his imagined stampede.

He was just walking, sweetie. Chewing gum,

not hay. It is exhausting to explain his non-horns

tearing through the thin gauze of civilization:

what is believed to be true must convince. Faith,

then, a requisite text, as the Lamb is to God?

Though bipedal and asthmatic, he was made centaur,

synching briefly humanity to his half-life; it made sense

where he stood that he stood on fours when sad,

like a chair carved Trojan, carted into his life,

that he could neither sit in nor shake colonizers from.

His human half shivered pronouncements

while his buck bottom flattened the field;

the meniscus of the meeting halves ahiss

with hair smooth as clay and skin

the same color, dull as a shy twin.

Brusquely present, the centaur’s precise measurements—

snout to kitchen where a blade-sharp fade sunsetted—

were bestiaried palpable, flanking love-letter

marginalia for his dick stretched by bewildering estimates

and inquiries about his fondness for trees and bones.

There was a poet in him cadavered

by liturgy: I am, I am, I am his ruptured

correspondence, his bewitched ontology

he could no more stamp out than stomp

clear its fire-fucked flag of himself.

He grows tired of proving his humanness without

his permission, for the language won’t cohere

to his nature, won’t make praying away the hooves

in the minds of others secede from his neigh

of perfect speech. He heeds neither indecency.

The beast squats on his chest

and the human writes its full-

of-itself self into full self in a form

he is rack-pulled into or trough-bent grandly over,

while moralists taxonomize his grandmas’ pleasure.

“The ancestors died for—” but the living

talk over the dead to protect their sons,

thinking the chains’ clink a ghost leash,

but the man knows no dogs span these thrones

neither whip nor Bible could dismantle.

The centaur is dead and so is its maker.

The man removes his clothes and feels.

He does not want to be paw or possible.

He wants to be alone, private, not your agreement.

He wants impossible. Unlearnèd without reign.

Black Joy

BLACK JOY

“I would like to help someone to live after my death”

—written on a donor card