If this were about dignity you wouldn't speak so homely
And I wouldn't be the poem telling you, (see) reminding you
to dream outloud, spend less about sleeping cause it seems like it's made you even
homelier, linear, you make even more sense now, dressed like a clown and drunk like cloning yourself for a late night
on the town? That was fun, at least a paragraph's worth of mediocre Keith Jarret unremembered, at least when he called you a nigger in my head I heard the word
for synagogue ( I wanted to hide from my own thought) and pictured an army nurse and you were a white man for the war so the stethoscope couldn't find your drummer, (seek refuge) (how to love someone you used to like)
I was not that mean, you were not that word except on the town
I was that powerful
sunny never in sin-agog washing the drums in foster english
My grandfather is rich and white, my father was rich and black
they were born in the same year, 19-- they were 19 in the same year of the repeat drinking fountain and there is something too kind about that
reciprocal, two kinds of history, Guuuuuuurl, I see the circus from every seat, a tent so flimsy I called the co-national guard on them
both, and they are my dearest friends
--
What kind of drum his dream was I having the archeology if this were about digging you wouldn't be so close to the surface and I wouldn't be the palm gripping the balletrusse in the air just before an earthquake all the animals make silence, all their eyes make sense to tremor on the town late oneofthose knights in the legends too obvious to tempt you into its depraved nihilism even though it goes on mentioning angels and unicorns you sense the lunge and the violence of some Rumpelstiltskin meets King Midas, everything he touched turned and turned into dervishes retrofitting his curse versus bless rut with leather to express what kind of drum his dream was beating
And those too lazy for telepathy call it peace
seizing, a treatment, where do we go from here
--
It is time to move
from yourself to yourself again
Tectonic merriment, mona lisa lessons, diminuendo, the men go mad getting made, having it made and broadcast and played back as suggestion
What is stark raving as a nation under orchestras of shame-ammunition-wayward-reignblur-manifest-homily-major-separation of kent and state-may the lord have mercy on our souls
--
And they are both veterans, they both fought in a war, and gladhanded their drums as dreams in which they met as champions and supplicants in which I am having in the space between
A cocktail, several roosters, a rifle, scooting through the rough lace of my tutu, my Tutsi, Miles' Tout de Suite where we almost fell for it, we almost taught the word back through itself, and both fathers kept asking to trade places that day on which no girl came between them no nigger-calling, no power plan, all the animals made silence and nothing that made sense was anymore
trusted
even what a soft lie some silence is
even what an ally is if every character in a dream is a representation of an aspect of the self or reputation
even when they are getting along
