Whisper Not

Morning with Singing Bowl

Cyclical Model of the Universe

Alright, now I'm gonna seem like I'm changing the subject, but I'm actually not changing/
the subject. There were two migrations of the pantheisitic deities from their origins. One was toward the apotheosis and one toward the human's purpose, to express consciousness in the biosphere. Now we combine both and celebrate the hybrid. To start, Imagine a party where nobody cares how good or bad anybody looks cause we are all too busy enjoying ourselves.

A demigod called Shiva is among the guests. She's even forgotten her own name and dances to the reach of its memory. And as long as Shiva dances, the universe, with all of its rules and regulations and conventions, continues to endure as it is. But when Shiva stops dancing, the whole thing implodes, the whole universe constricts into whatever it was before the big bang. And everything is calm and black and there is nothing. And then Shiva starts dancing again and it's all returning but from the beginnings and brand new scenarios but the same everlasting whole. And we're told that Shiva is about truth and eternity, soul and soul again. But the truth part is really hard because when you get beyond the world of illusion and see everything in its beauty and concrete particularity, you also see the world for what it is and we are all so deeply, deeply imperfect. We know that human beings are really a sorry lot indeed, and yet we have the capacity to do this stuff, to see the world both close up and at a distance because we're also deeply deeply perfect and renewable too. So the truth in her movements makes Shiva an outsider. Which is how she remembers her name. She's the one who comes into the community which is rigidly compressed and tradition bound and seduces everybody's husband and breaks up all these families and then runs off into the forest. And they run after her and try to hurt her because she's upset all these frantically stable life forms. However it's not so easy to hurt Shiva, since she is also the embodiment of asceticism and healing. The one who sees who we are from the perspective that is greater than ourselves so that she is no longer embedded in the rules and traditions and ego trips that we use to give our lives meaning. And she tries to awaken us to this perspective as an act of generosity and of courage. And anyways we need her to keep dancing

Chomping on a Red Delicious

It's practically a massacre
All this simple joy or
 the bliss of a journey from compentent to master with
no repentence in the afterall / An inverse massacre/ a rebirth/no more flattery but as  you are/
It's practical to fall up
such preferences for tough light and the best company of children and indians--
natives, I mean, incorrecting our dream. Know your history, I mean, it shows up like a future/seeds hidden in moss and water, protected by how you forget them so they can scatter like an afrobeat hymn I once heard everything scatter and called it blackness or getting ready for church step one: Eat that damn apple and stay in the house, it's about to rain out and you can taste that too. How does it taste though? 

Another Great Day in the Morning

Great Day in the Morning (Great Day in the Noon Night Too) by Brightmoments on Mixcloud

Pattern Integrity

Wonderful

Be Hip to Your Actions

Span Time

Buffalo '66 from Rosina User on Vimeo.

One for the Ghost

For the greater deed

Hot Grits

It could be called a midnight symphony

You've been chewing that Frankincense again

I step into my father's solitude and it works. Now we share a big idea together. A Harmony in infinite parts– How a visionary is a caller of light, one who summons spirits that heal. How there is no other reason than this, to make music or to live

Dark lights up a white forest

The two of you looking in one mirror til it was right

Forget the politicians; they are on the moon

Feats of Strength

The basic rhythm adjusts to the rhythm of the word 'mystery'

Comfort Zone

The bridge is a thing of this sort. The locale allows the simple onefold of earth and sky, of divinities and mortals, to enter into a site by arranging that into spaces. This makes room for the double sense, sixth sense, seventh. The two-- making room and in the sense of admitting and the sense of installing-- belong together. In a land where belonging is second to possessing in the sense of entering or going between everything and everything, between earth and sky, divinities and mortals, our ignorance will be our freedom

I never know just what I'm going to sing or when

We are the children we're always referring to
Nature and nurture crashing into one another
Until...Lemme start loving myself the sure way 
Reefer and ice and some sluggish I got a right to
sing the blues
Naked on stage and in my imagination, when are you gonna understand
All we do is pray and prove the shit you wanna ignore is all the things you are

Silver magic ships you carry

C'mon Feet

Promises

Yes, I am your will

The sensuous anything observer

Lately, House Negros make the best sociopaths. Their outbursts of magic purple sunshine are all blasphemy. Obnoxious snack foods and big food cereals rotting in their cupboards and in their stomachs, stucco somewhere bobbing on the soul and the whiskey stench of their pent up lust burning them out, hour by complacent hour. Does it take one to know one? No one wants to admit anything uncomfortable anymore. Affairs are more comfortable than war crimes. The head of the CIA resigns, comfortably, and now both of his women have time to manicure their nails and him too, lately. At one time, the field fed the house milk and honey, hymns and timber til the owl finished wailing in silence, one time she was still singing in the morning about oneness, one time retreat would blind them one line away from the certain circle like a close up on the word yes makes it impossible to define except, damn, your man and the man and are the same bland team posing like enemies, trying to trick you, looking closer than anything to one another and they even want you to notice and to love them both. When you laugh about it afro wigs fall from the sky, made in Foxconn, China. You long to stay home and wear one to the corner store for lemonade, alone, looking for new ways to rhyme yes with itself like in Fine and Mellow

That's Our Business (don't tell 'em)

Nationality suite (1) (mixed metaphors)

Support your local whistleblower

This song is really for everyone

Scene three/took four-- a slow ride on all seven kinds of ambiguity and killer robots tore the whole factory into sleeves and brandtags/bandits/ as women jumped out of windows dragging the fire with them and survived with no metaphors or anything. The tattoo said it had to be you. From now on we're only writing love songs or escape songs. These paper trumpets are unfurling, sped up for your appreciation, til it all turns maddening and soothing again and the revolution is vague on these buffer zones and clones the vault it runs from anyways. Exclaim for soma, for so many dangers make it safe again for soma. Focus on sanity like snowmen and flannels. That black man who can swim again. But he swims like he thinks when he thinks someone's watching, desperately, detached, catchy techno fake plastic trees and blunts in a fetal postion. Sometimes acts so phony you wanna bring him home/back, blame him for his own power and powerlessness until the ships in your imagination are just twirling on a strung song like early ballerinas in their studio full of mirrors, murmuring, trust us, leaping out of a turn, falling into a split, getting up gracefully and walking with the mirror, not what they seem, not what they took for

We are still black and we have come back

Connaissance/

Meditations on music's ability to love itself

Who do you know?

God don't like ugly

Love Notes 1

Secret Queens of The Unseen

Stay Black Sun/days

Stills from the Tiger's Mind

I love you, for electrical reasons. And the trouble when treason's a way of laddering the frequencies-- Innocence, tantrum, steel drum, clap drum, plank sun, plank, son-- humble walk on, at the risk of sounding mystical, we belong on this thin wire of our need for one another just about to buckle when the phone rings--- Hush-- crushed velvet slippery eyelid tucked into a dream the truths bribe me between them with intuition and their silent duel, huddle, duel again, tricked into another atomic opinion. I could hug my shins and wait for the world to end. A shout out to the g steady selling jars of bubbles on 103rd, though. Even in winter, clear tendrils of soap blowing in the putrid air. I almost forgot. Shout out the macho dude on the 1 train with the pastel pink ice skates draped over his shoulder. My feet were bleeding into lamb's wool after a ballet class and it is strangely pleasurable to watch an empire collapsing in slow motion, thinking, folly for so-what, thinking, I'm one of those token immortals, thinking, the misfits don't look so terrible these days, brave even, caring, thinking, like me, everything I cherish will be essential again, thinking, there he goes again, selling bubbles and cocaine outside of the mcdonals, looking flippant and regal like how it feels to turn into yourself

Reading the yellow pages backwards

Prisoners of hope

and the prison be as wide as god's eye

Niggas in Raincoats section 3

To whom who keeps a record

Close your eyes and remember

Blueprint for Byard Rustin

Dark, a little dank, smoke-soaked, and blue/ His feet flutter in a soft shuffle, chiming in silence with the urgency of firebells, spinning in slow so binding circles. We need in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers Then he looks away, adamantly, with that shimmering abandonment in every black man's eye We are perfectly normal neurotics, crowding around our symptoms with humor and wit, geniuses because of it, helplessly hyper-aware, even when dignity is boring, even when pleasure is more traumatic than anything. Can you dig it? Can you dig it without treating it like dirt? Some of the trouble be angels, be us in the firm poses after dancing, all breath and glances and this is your chance to tempt the good myth to step in your shadow

Mighty/Pretty

Don't you feel that way, sometimes

Call his name grandly

like a man drawing a bird

Tones for a Black President by Brightmoments on Mixcloud

Leadership (save all that comrades, we need it)

Reggae Sundays

"Hey! Monk would call out, "butterflies faster than birds? Must be, 'cause with all the birds up on the scene in my neighborhood, there's this butterfly, and she flies any way she wanna. Yeah. Black and yellow butterfly. Pretty Butterfly."

Good lookin' out

Music and then some more music after that

Which is the true one?

He drags his shadow against the current, toward the coming spring

Niggas in Raincoats reprise

Even alleged militants blame the  vanishing of the summer sea ice on Ghosts (short version) by Albert Ayler. He disappeared while he was getting his sound together. No one knows what happened but the water high in increments like a crown around his cries and glass is a liquid and you have to forgive your parents for whatever it is and they have to forgive themselves

I would like to use this craft to fly with him
  
 I feel black the morning after and try--  again---  warm in the habit of our warning and yearning for more of them until

     We finally need to see this reckoning

But when it's time I'm not ready and when I'm ready it's not time-- that's fate. And blind in the halo of long ago we make it a future

I say, I don't know who you are. I say, I do it all for you anyways (long run)--- Gorgeous photographs of industrial ruins so lush you want to lick them, be them, become a trend. Crushed under the debris, an instrument is so tender it breaks and mends in the same note, becoming men is like that, degrading, uplifting, denial lazily caving in Isis and ice until all of our guesses are obsolete we can't see nobody who isn't disappearing

Night on the town

Contrary to a lot of illusions and a super sudden astral earth rotten with its own bloom, everything was coming to a beginning like rumors and nurses

The euphoria among us was so  much like war, we thought and fucked like prisoners:

certain blacks, do what they wanna; certain blacks groove on love

so many bruises proven on the roman memory, red bone, crisp blue sun, yellow lemming marching out of the grand area, numb southern girl marching away from the cliff, wide pink curlers in her hair, holding an ice cream cone, wearing her man's starter jacket/it doesn't get much better, it takes a genius to not see it, how there's a standard procedure for when one of our favorite dictators gets into trouble, send him out to pasture in black english, the club, the so fast deliverance headquarters, and three bitches later --what he called them in his radiance-- you're his favorite song again as he stumbles in blowing america the beautiful on the trumpet rescued from the pawn shop and you stand up in bed and dance like a statue until it's a new sky all through the wall glimmering like always past the dusty hotel blinds. I forget how everything is beautiful like a rescue mission and the man you love standing still under the glare of his regret for getting free

Certain Blacks by Brightmoments on Mixcloud

He do the preachers in different voices

Loving vs. Virginia mode 2 (lament for Stop and Frisk)

The race starts with a gun, some self-appointed vigilante jerks into the crease and aims, mutters monkey, mutters keep it on the hush, tells us how to run without looking suspect, treats his freedom like an interview

So how do you recognize change?

I don't recognize you

I'm running

don't shoot     The race starts with a camera clapping for the pact language overrides in social life and we act like you say, he mutters polka dots and moonbeams  lace in his eyes seems like don't wait up--  but the gold fronts and total chicken grease survivalism of him crushes the opposition

I crescent in the limbs looking for something to pretend to be holding straight off the bend. Fall into my own embrace, apostrophe, stray embers, trophy dive beam/ see you on the flip side. pladau, how you, how you, wanna be/like me/ now...  The air is full of what it relinquishes. A costume of sound pushing the thinking/thinking if I could I would be what it relinquishes. That gift, that lifted figaro in the shower, spur, sputter, whisper, how many feet beating the clay into the shape of the race make it across on record and sign some non-disclosure agreement all green and anything you say blood, nickname for family, synonym for how far to run

There is no greater love take 2

I shall see myself, I shall read myself, I shall go into ecstasies, I shall say is it possible to have so much spirit

Black Entertainment's Slow Memory Blues

Heroes are so rare/ it's you or no one. It might have been better to have stayed down there in the village and planted olive trees, had a lot of children and beaten your wife.  Do you still love to sing?

Theme for a private dancer

To show the melody of the informers

Night Food

Where were you when I

Let's play Cherokee and go through all the keys 

Every city has at least one

carousel

I want to test them. All 

of his variations were calm and perfect 

like a horse's, like a good whore's, like a quarter past, half past, a leg, a bell or allegory, twitches

Recess!; step on the ropes you're parting with your ankles and it all twists gruesome and effortless neuroplasticity of a child in 

a slender Chinese game about 

nightfall: the Anglos look like robots so many 

imagine having been the rope

Is there kindness behind those eyes. Switching/switching on me

Step on my back, it's hurting 

I may be drunk by morning 

Dawn on us

One for Orneezie

This is Pictures

I’m being so candid I’m a pattern. So many casual flags churning on the rim of my heart/I’m being so human I’m a choir. The knights of faith are dangerous and I feel safest with them /blackbirds flying in the ripe-ripe finity of tribe. In love with eternity. Kierkegaard presses against my window like a playdoll. Fear and Loathing. It’s a thing about living happily ever after I do on purpose and by accident too. I’m being so childlike I’m a child. At the abortion clinic we held hands and fell out of love with wideness and then back in with a wild lean. And you kept me---

I once read how all the cocaine burst out of Richard Prior like he was a piñata and now the kids from that birthday party, extras in a film of his, all day on a set of burnt grass and hugging balloons, how now they believe in negro angels and try to open every terrible door with a baseball bat or a joke about black habits or a line from a Pam Grier flick like 'you don't know what is.' I read that I was one of those kids. A bulge in the minutes makes us scream inside. I remember now, how we can make sound without being seen. The scream creates room for silence. I picture the silence and get a nauseous sense of peace that makes me suck on ginger and miss the ridges in him enough to press all seven buttons with my eyes shut. The smile in him sounds like it hurts but I hang up before he can tell me why.  Something like starting from the beginning feels like the right thing to do. When I dial again it all swings with kisses

Talkin' on the whistle

Jazz and Baseball

NLB Revisited by Brightmoments on Mixcloud

Now's always the time

What I love about the bad men is how they always know the good music. Sometimes they even make it. Sometimes they ain't bad enough. Sometimes they too good. Two shapes on a hill. Two forms running with the slope

Them's fighting words

Advanced devotion

Yet a part of me

Langston From the Vault by Brightmoments on Mixcloud

The Coming of the Americans

Landmarks

Two boys and a little girl running down the road toward the crossing, giggling. 
They stop running. 
"Hey, Yawl," the bigger boy yells, "Better keep up else I run off and leave you on this side." 

An admirable day

No frenzy. And the implacable Venus gazes far into the distance at some object or other with her marble eyes

Infinity Machine

Advanced Food

Advanced Jazz

Excessive presence leaves no traces but injustice leaves everything untouched

Essentials of Grammar

and I /must admit 
that the sea in me
is still/ in love 
with the sea in you
because the sea 
that now sings /in me
is the same sea 
that nearly swallowed you
   and me too

Three trees standing

On the ledge of our hearts

Sunday Service St. John's Day by M4l-Funct10n'D on Mixcloud

The Sudden

snug silence in the middle of the garden

Strobe

I began to miss the light like it really is /getting in between two actions: apathy/fascination. People get closer and closer to the beauty of their invention and it tramples them. You can get so close you don't need to say a word. It's blurry without being sentimental like a rebellion in the hood. It's perfect without being good.

Perhaps we should lose the noun

which renders us nostalgic. Replace traces with tracing and don't call it anything

Sharps and Flats

Be embarrassed to talk about being happy, that's ridiculous
But we need you rebel, you prolong our fascination with myth. Drenched in that fascination we get so happy we can't even talk about it without crying-- I'm the rebel. You should apologize to me, you rushed into thinking I was demeaning because the truth had no meaning to you but your contrite blue rhythm and a break in--- something stolen from you like there's music in the air but you can't hear none cause you're numb, so numb and terrible at the purple under your soul desert screaming James Brown's--Try me, Try me. Loops. That's all we like is loops. We narrow the records and arks into a few chords and we really miss our mothers, if we ignore them we become them chords/cores/coercive-arcadia. Let's not ignore them. I once met a fanatical admirer of the railroads, a real leader/rider/sociopath nigga in a slick yellow rainjacket coated in mirrors and austere optimism. I was almost but not quite, home in him. He ignores his mother whimsically. I button my heart back together with blasted green stones from him. That's all we dream in loops. The record swims on its axis like a black man from Baltimore.  Jabbing his arms into a calm azure, wordless quarrel with the rebel. Never been there. I'm exactly where he would want to get to next. The record carries him on its dissociative current as he weeps and rubbs his eyes until they burn and ricochet off the imaginary always with shy arousal. He meant to say how nice it felt to be beside her that day and how silently she was like everyone he ever needed to know and it all felt dangerously close to rebirth and embarrassingly near-happiness. The wave bathes the cliff in foam and retreats

Conjunction 'junction (what's your function)

Some notes on the oneness of juju

It's always night or we wouldn't need light

Kodak Moments

Maybe he ain't lying

Some triumphant

Government of the world begins in us. Its not the sincere who govern the world, but neither is it the insincere, it's those who create in themselves a real sincerity by artificial and automatic means. This sincerity is what makes them strong, and it outshines the less false sincerity of others. To be adept at deluding oneself is the first prerequisite of a statesman. 

Dizzy Atmosphere in the Ritual

Between the music and us

Speech patterns

Monk on Time

Our earliest childhood memories are bound up with the sound of dynamite and pride

was like   "I don't want nothin black but a cadillac"

and love 

was like "You niggas are sick for that

self-hate" 

and truth was like "yeah, well, whatchuknow about it." 

... a sudden acute disengagement ... a brilliant corner in the night we raided, muted 

Nica's Dreams

Is is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent?

California/Knows how to party

The heat, this calm, this quiet scene

One man says: Why don't you straighten out and act like a white man

The same man warns: But watch the black extra, a one frame shot on a John Wayne western, slide over and shaft Wayne offscreen. 

Giant Folklore for the Sky

and a huge ivory rivalry ate the night twice this August, moonshine/ finally, and again
god and reason became dialects, me talk pretty any day now, they pledged and played the circle game over and over until there were no more curves in the road just light and shadow, tears and blow-kisses at the moment you mean to lift a fuck you finger, it works like gagging, works when you want to scream, choking on the atmosphere in a dream. Silence is a place in which to scream, and the ivory in me gets too many hands once in a while I'd like to land on the moon with the good liars-- dialectical I mean, we become opposites because it's too painful to face the tribe and deny it. Much to my disappointment, to meet god you gotta meet the devil too, and both are so beautiful every two moon August you almost wanna worship a man you can't stand just to protect the one you love from the commons. The lies could grow on us, fill us up with ivory and paint us black beauty, have us at the front door of our own homes asking for directions home--- I think we'd better dance quietly until the sun rises

Favoritism

When after all the chaos of unknowns, when you make a tender statement, something real sweet-direct, when you just caress a note,

The better angels of our nature

Patriot axe puzzles

Complete Mythology

Motown Philly Back Again

We're all pagans and shamans and clap your hands now we won't stop the beat

We believe in divine healing and we hate to see that evening sun go down 

We know when the sight of our women dressed in white on ritual night, is touching, hypnotizes

The animals blush and split for us as revival, as revealed to themselves

These are triumphant women. 

Even Sister Fame hiding out in the alley turning tricks and singing verses from the undid scripture, is touching

Thank you jesus, thank you jesus, that you jesus, baby, is that you, she mutters up high between rocks and lace---his eagerness--- it was all night long

Sometimes he'd interrupt a recording session to tell us about his early Motown days or expand on his views of Heaven and Hell

One time he was saying how important it was to love one's father.

Do you love yours? I asked him

Why don't you tell him

Why don't you tell your father, he said

I will if you do

You go first

Timing/ (the applause)

Not now, I'll tell you when.

The militants are balanced with such complacent creatures, the critic wrote, that the race will never get it together



Now you hold your own hand
Now I sing the body electric and panic when it answers, yes, yes
Now you walk through the glass and fill your arms with prophylactics and breakfast cereal
water and a real solid afro pic, a few lottery tickets and party hats, a jar of pickles, a unripe mango, is this a spell, is this right spell, and run your ass home as fast as you can, as fast as you ever can

Now

The magazine said

that the girl should have gone solo

that she reflected on her childhood when she should have been 

dressing and heading for the stage

Leadership

Jupiter in Scorpio

The Ballad of Edie Barrow

He looked deep and long in my long black eyes.
And he played his songs in my long black hair.
He took me away to his summertime place
Close was our flesh in the winking hours
closely and sweetly entwined
Let this good way continue out beyond
her power to believe or to surmise
No more
bringers of tedium, bringers of the driveway
Bringers of the lookout, bringers of the idle perch
Let this good way continue out beyond
their power to believe or surmise

Footprints

The Paper Dolls are Terrible

Time frame

A minister and twins

Accept no substitutes

It can be said that the music is a truth we know because we live it

Great day in the morning

I was browsing the "Jazz Books" section of Amazon one dawn in cyberspace when Karl Marx's biography: Karl Marx, His Life and Environment. popped up on the list, right after How Satchmo Blew up the World.  Then came Traps: The Drum Wonder: The Life of Buddy Rich. Then Lady Sings the Blues, Centennial Edition wherein when the editor asked Holiday herself to remove some of the profanity, she wrote a memo back in thick black action letters. "change bitch to whore," Next on the list was The American Ways Series: Jazz in American Culture. Then: The Atlantic Story, Then Nina Simone's gorgeously written biography: I Put a Spell on You, then Hampton Hawes' masterpiece, slavepeace, dimepiece, Raise up off Me. The sun was soft on a blunt mumbling urban horizon and even when some of them resemble lost bunnies and playboys on an expedition into the way we live-- it was a great day in the morning, another great day in the morning 

But wait...

We was here before god

we invented him--

to describe ourselves in that blunt mirror of actual spiritual embezzlement 

We in shiny suits

Privacy

Frantic privacy
Why do you do so many
Jazz poems?

This must be deep

What-now upside the wall I see/ a shadow of the image-me

Storytelling abilities

My soft antagonist. He is already on parole for waving an unloaded gun at one of our neighbors. 

His eyes pace the jury for jade, or savior, or another blurred mistake bird

Milkshake brings all boys to the yard

byrd/Confirmation dancing between white sheets. I made myself

all three/green dress/ white 

shadow /Katherine Dunham waltz, knot of all/not at all 

to appease him, just because I can 

be the alter

And then, and then, and then

We reach the uncanny-valley

we make ourselves at home and we make ourselves away-- our valor, our very victory, it weighs us down with its         forgiving heart 

It likes the way things sound when they are all torn apart.

The gun becomes a flag and the flag a numb addict

Trembling, charming, anything the critic can lip sync to on the primal, on the fugitivity, on the gate note--- is it a cry -mme/ is it a... 

that I still, that I still find 

his emptiness heroic, opulent, a good neighborhood, a flag with no bullets through it. 

A day with no riddles in it is such eeriness

A riddle with no days in it is just delirious. 

And trouble only keeps us safe to tell it 

And then, and then, and then

We reach out to it again

One for My Immediate Niggas

I declare (A murmuring crevice in the hype/justice binary)

Watch a little how she dances

Transforms your nightmare into a quest, doesn't acquiesce--

We came here with new faces

Trying to embody an idea so clearly that it disappears, disperses, begins being how it is in the tribe

Ever notice some high yellow honeys have such high energy

Ever wonder why

Eight men, four women

The mimic men make statements

You might see a robot going through a series of events

Stressing out the fruits as they ripen
which helps the sugars become more concentrated, not the nutrients but the sugars, gently yield together

the drenched feathers of a flock of, no a herd of... have you heard of

the lacto-fermented tears of the black man

They got all the relevant knowledge from just them

And, yes, the machine was understanding

The machine understood me as it manufactured

Dystopian themes and the cyborg hustle and good machine poetry and the low-key brutality of video hopefuls and wannabes, in honor of--

We used to be a merciful people/ we used to be a humane people

Reincarnation is real.

It's nice to slow down in the middle of a baton crumbling around the dream like lightening, and let it strike like police at the peaceful gathering because then at least someone screams and

then for the space of that evening you have completely broken out of the ranks of your family, which veers off into the void, while you yourself, firm as canbe, black with your sharpness of outline, slapping the back off your thighs, rise to your true stature. All this is intensified still further if at so late an hour of evening you look up a lover to see how he is doing

For the street slopes uphill, and the moon is full

and the echo is no longer a bully
and it's not an ad campaign either
and it nods majestically
yes, no, maybe, not so fast, faster than that 
he comes running towards us and we let him run on

Becoming a Good American

Senghor will not be shred

love, 
gargantuan gardens in the careful sun, 
fairy story gold, thrones, feasts and three princesses 
summer sailboats 
like cartoon ghosts or klansmen, pointing up
white questions in the blue air...
No. 
Believes in beauty... 


shall we sit on ourselves; shall we wait behind roses and veils for monsters to maul us, 
for bulls to come butt us forever and ever, 
shall we scratch in our blood, 
point air-powered hands at our wounds, 
reflect on the aim of our bulls. 


How proud
How prowed

Sophisticated Daydream

I love questions too, and we have some of the same obsessions. A zen tempo in decadent places. The unanswered ones that pace the cursor looking for hunters/who do you love in a sunny union of immense parallels, when miracles and disasters are one thing together, mellow explosions of habit to destabilize the black myth, and all we can say is, oh well. We know our mothers would get along too well, like enemies. It would be enough to make us feel like orphans, eventually

Theme for a Great Pretender

The twin poles of survival

All I have to offer is myself

He ain't heavy; he's my people

And as we entered that country, it felt like someone was inventing us. As I carried him home, he carried me only-- as we enter that homescene, it feels like someone else. The telephone keeps ringing. Pick it up and no one's on the line or else-- celebrate. Chase the bell into its own trembling hands and the weightlessness, the devastating weightlessness of what he ain't quivers like a deflating balloon in the corner, and that's bloom too

Heart on sleeve

Life sits or blazes in this mecca

there's nowhere between the merely savage and the merely sentimental so nowhere snaps into a local

          dissatisfied and free

zone. Choreographing a solo for mulatto dancer about the whites only mourners bench Billie Holiday describes seeing in her childhood church. The dancer is forever/half there, haunting each lament with the math in her movements and considered movements. Running toward the bench, then backing away, then leaping, then scooting away on her ass, as if from some predator, then tiptoeing up to ask permission to join again, then sitting, then crying, then running away, then turning back to ask for forgiveness, then nevermind, then turning back to say nevermind, then being asked to join, then the mourners can't mourn without the math in her movements and considered movements. Then she no longer cares. Then she hides from them. Then she builds a new church, a blacks only mourners bench. That doesn't work either.  Impossibility is a destiny and she reaches its needles and spins on them like they mention gardens from where she's been left out of the myth and written new ones in a two-way language. The roosters catch on and jiggle their coos something urgent and tender as she sidles between them like movie shot in manhattan stoop feet dawn from now on, dissatisfied and free

Les Temps des Moissons

Each one other Is having different weather

Gazelle

I saw you painted on a ghetto wall last summer and thought don't submit to this medium... everybody's running into the wall or running into each other and plagiarizing our future like mummies and nukes, I watched you hug the Mona Lisa. I wanna use the word pariah until it shrugs for us and even their disguises go limp as a fire tumbling down a hillside into the playfulness in my heart, acres and acres of a lean, almost spiritual vibe afraid of its own momentum and then not afraid again