Manumission Suite
This kind of happiness–can you think as fast, can you mix it up as good as you used to–has become exotic or a threat, therefore the thrill of danger, therefore I chase it. Through euphoria and binge, slow dancing under the doo-wop, waiting for it to pass like in Imitation of Life when everything passes, paperless, but you can too
come with me to the proof. Suitable hues, church windows and ships twirled into an etch-a-sketch and shook mute. Wobbling, not trembling or pleading the blood in/
blood out
uncoordinated angelic slang of when
(this) authenticity is a service
that blacks have learned to provide for American popular–
Fantasy swapping but confessing nothing
as if he had sprung entire from his own imagination A feigned interior you might hear in a rich merchant's voice like void light
Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City and in even lower or more sybarite locations where kings go forth in the slow memories of ex-kings and don't get weary, either, frontier attitudes or vacant titles or the sublime restraint of a boy with good timing and kind enough to keep that to himself, as in a solo, motionless expression of the universal, and his mouth hung slightly open to expel desire or to deserve impersonations, like in the comics, and to seem calm when he asks
What about the party? And you get glad and aloof and inefficient and rare onto the loops of winter sand any heat can render literacy, 'that's where we were when it started,' holding up our charts, filling up our charts
