Your Mama Don't Wear no Draws

Words that we both know are what keeps you, on the stable floor, from the years I saw, nervously beneath you, and now we'll discover a cello with every word that we both know, in between a stunted flow, and I couldn't care less about your mother. Do you know that I couldn't have won so fair, just last year, and as a foreigner here, excuse my longing for a limelight and not a hope in hell, cause it's sad that I'm not at home. And if I change it's nice to know that soon, I'll change back to use words that we both know

(We was there when she took 'em off)

Society Gig

aristocrats among fiends and prostitutes
before the intellectuals, waiting til snow
falls and only then hiding. Signaling out for each its contoured tribal burden
until they come alive in one another like fountains and hints and we shiver, kiss wrists, fit perfect into a nightshift grocer's routine anticipation of hope for the conversation on earth. New York, will you give up your death for us like a mimic prophet buckling on the grid of yourself. Become less significant and more meaningful. Disappear to be everywhere I mean. Go against the delirium of reputation and become sane and empty the guile into a river and go on to hire detectives who will re-invent the suspense we run on as they solve the river for the static they inflict it with nerve. I dream of pirates bold enough to hide their time. Your thrills grow dull with glamor, theirs grow high on militant anonymity. My meaningful other. Block party, corner store. Celebrate the brilliance of wolves.

The Gospel According to Sun Ra/Everywhere Over the Rainbow

The Man Who Went to Chicago

If you think about me, and you ain't gonna do no revolutionary act, forget about me, I don't want myself on your mind

Poem for Speculative Pharaohs

A great free--
Soul for rent, faculty
trembled as those light score-board-speckled pamphlets about the audacity of disembodiment rippled in the palm wine tannins tempting culty ever since types: sycophants, climbers, to mercilessly reveal how time hurts in the speed of how you see in no time
What I'm trying say-- how you see it so and numb it total, patiently, trial after stoic trial until a child must exist. The inevitability of where we roam is where we get to. Shy arrivance accused of privilege and compliments until the circles got huge like black continent free souls for rent and we went on wanting
Obedience, to convince itself, of itself, but it didn't and so on and so on and 'all songs are crazy'

This is how we flower: avowal

Things we cannot see appear, singing songs we cannot hear

Value haunts our lives, they're chanting into the arms of riot police. These are at least embraces.

The trite machine gun wears its stupor into the middle of whispers like a testing/testing microphone and tells us so, sudden announcer, cotton curtains in the singer's throat and the blank stare in stereo of a voice inhabited by justice is so appropriate it disappears

Coming Together/Maybe There's Enough Thunder

The Oasis is all in a Clamor

What happened to destroy the cathedral happened to become the cathedral

I pray in those, pet the bull chasers with race records until the patrons notice a theater machine and I'm selling its stages back to them as black Athens as I can– an impromptu festival

Stage 1.

There comes a time to wake up to what's happening
There comes a time to get out of what's happening
I love you more than what's happening

1.5 (It's only true if I believe you)

Stage 2.

They lied, but not enough

Stage 3.

There comes a time to wake up to what's happening
There comes a time to get out of what's happening
I love you more than what's happening

They say the cathedral's repeating itself and life is elsewhere

Cabaret Tax for Dancing

Fat dawn, get back into bed

Where the effort to put the fragments together transforms them into what he said it won't ever become like all the ready-made ever seen daybreak revoke itself

On the slopes of a petty, loving, request

Could you create an era that decisive and then behave just like it. Slim dawn, tender wandering, dawn, my jury, the black mass surrounds you hoping to be invited

Once he was asked to describe the revivals

He called them dead copycats of the apocalypse can't stop myself when I'm real

Two Canaries

One mo' Gin

The moonlight's but a spotlight

Antenna, numb antenna

Prodding the air in a marionette-ish way, catches the Day of the Mariner in black and white on a major channel, one of the stations owned by Time Warner and soft drinks, I think of watching as a kind of duty of the quarantine and looking away as how it got beautiful/his both-ways veil screaming, live, you crazy motherfucker, live, and organize your shit, he promised both ways. Men cry the fists out of their faces and land on the doorstep cradling an apologetic used television. Some women want appliances. Stationary, masculine. Geisha stay up late tuning all the gray aura in praise of aura geisha stay up a little later pretending she's tiptoeing across a lake to rescue miracles from the bravery complex and hope no more televisions show up on my doorstep. Some women want silence. Phonograph in a climate of heroic tinyness, that gigantic time, a fine cylinder uncoiling the words I'm learning in a marionette-ish way up late geisha way too late to tell him the way she thinks the silence is the best thing between them. But Monk knew. Blue Monk. Light Blue. He drew it to her vague and in charge like a governor or mariner he'd say. It just falls, it fills that hunger for seeing or being someplace else

Evangelical/You're no Angel

What is really this?

It is the friend. Neither violent nor weak. The friend.

It is the beloved. Neither tormenting nor tormented. The beloved.