thin fabric inside the shoes that he would loan me to wear to my first prom

thin fabric abreast of a little series of embankments    shores between the wind

Yes   I’ve known rivers     my father and I straddled them below Lincoln’s face

I’ve stood abreast of this river within a river of onlookers

I’ve stood and not drowned

My father places his arm around me to keep warm

crouches at his overworked knees    Can you see him son?

And beneath my little hat     part of his voice is lost in the skin

I say    No   and watch his face crease

He becomes the bed of the Mississippi

He reaches beneath my armpits his palms matching small valleys I am 110 pounds

There     the brief inhale before he tries to lift me to his shoulders      above him

as he always planned      We both know I am too big to lift  O my father

my Sisyphus   I return to the earth

knowing now that my father loves me to failure

and yet    he returned to the work of showing me who I could be    My

father bent again  within inches of prayer on the frozen street  while the soul

of the country contemplated whether it was ready to lift a man who has

no father left to lift him just to see a brown spot   I thought I was too grown

to see    The second time   he lifts me   I sit on his shoulders  falling deep

in love with this man whose blood is not my blood  who people say I am like

But I thought then   Maybe this country is mine     On the

bus ride back    we sang    amidst white folk   We sang past the rivers

NEGROTOPIA #3 (SELF PORTRAIT AS HEAVEN)

We like the promised land of the OGs

KANYE WEST

Cue the Anthony Hamilton/and name me a mansion/tell everyone there is space here/if you believe in the reincarnated/I am already somewhere/that somebody has gone/after they died/so I am heaven/cue the gold clouds/the gospel songs/the voices you didn’t know you missed/until you heard them/for the first time/watch me glitter/watch me gold/watch me be exactly the show you were promised/forget what tried to kill you/just for a second/forget its name/and only remember that it missed/cue the wings/cue the rain/I promise this is not the end/I promise we get to be everywhere now/I promise that the only heaven/that can hold us/is us

SAD NIGGA MANIFESTO

After Terrance Hayes

I won’t blunt my blade for cut these chains /
rather let my limbs be drug through the mud

FRANK OCEAN

Some songs can only be the orange echo

of a Western sky     Something is always spilling

and the heat mops it up before the stain

even has a chance to name itself

I was born exhausted of fleeing