Chapters (50)

This guy wept
and told us
he wanted to touch
the earth
with the fury
of a falling star.
This guy wore snow-
storm glitter and bangles
of lightning and tears
back when our slogan was:
Never Pull A Slow Gun
lest your children’s link
with you be broken
and they janitor
a blank banner of surrender
into and out of
all the iridescent cities
of War.
All modern thought
is permeated by the idea
of thinking the unthinkable.
Ziggy Stardust,
Ziggy Stardust,
A moonage daydream, Baby,
put your ray gun to my head.
Black as a black hole,
why does your big electric pupil
keep looking at me?
I could write my name
in the makeup
on your face.
Sweet blue boy
with a black wind

whistling
through the spaces
between your teeth,
O, whoa, whoa, whoa,
you’re a rock n roll suicide.
The song has gone
on forever
And you say, as it is said
Samuel Beckett said
at the end of his life:
What a hell of a morning it’s been . . .

THE BLUE ETHERIDGE

Dear Parole Board of the Perennial Now,
let me begin by saying it’s very likely
none of my ex-wives will vouch for me.
Let’s just say the parable
of the Negro who uses his dick for a cane
and the parable of the Negro who uses his cane
for a dick convey the same message to me.
I’m sorry. You mean before that?
Well, it’s as if some ghost the height
of my granddaddy was lighting a cigarette
the wrong way to symbolize my muddy path
through life. You ever seen the Mississippi?
You’ll learn all you need to know
if you look at the wall of my kinfolk’s pictures.
Belzora. BuShie. My sisters. Me
and my brothers fishing in high waters.
Whenever I see brown hills and red gullies,
I remember what the world was like
before I twisted spoons over flames.
I pissed from a bridge the day I left.
Yes Sir, I’ve changed, I’ve changed.
But I won’t be telling you the story
of the forlorn Negro or the Negro cutthroat
or the Negro Hero or the Negro Tom.
I won’t be telling you the story of the night
I died. I believe everything comes back
to music or money. Belly Song.
Song of the twelve-fingered fix.
Song of The Gemini Women. I know I’m cursed.
I sang out to the Baptists I saw gathered
on the riverbank the day I left. I sang out
to the reeds straight as tongues and the salmon
in the waters of my people, and beyond that
to my barrel-backed shadow damming the stream.

HARRYETTE MULLEN LECTURE ON THE AMERICAN DREAM