Miss Thing Dances With Her Shadow

In a moonlight cracked with vigils and suitors. Must have been some celestial czar taught the black male invisibility as a survival tactic, to match the crescent thinking don't blame me if disappearance becomes its own rival.  Or trivial like a given.  Or if tenderness is the wildest thing, afterall, in the whole black imagination rubbing through like a hustler's diamond, pressure and chimes, crime and medicine. Plunging through the velvet curtains with a pyrite mask on, Just to watch these movies, man, and hear your mother say, everything is going to be okay, don't cry, as you sob in the middle of An American Tale. Forever Young. Even the way we use our bodies is so open it closes or encloses, cloaks us in the joke with poker faces, total youth, and soda addictions. Get off that shit, it kills you slowly and starts by clamping your mind in its carbonated rubble.  And I won't try to trace the steps which turn this dancer's grunts into music. And I won't try to trace the way the steam on the slave's hoe every day in the field, how does it feel, how did it  feel, how the heat on metal turned the cornmeal into cake, and we ate it. And it tasted hip and bland like a guitar tar baby, it tasted like your maker, like your makers mark, drunk on corn and plow we arched our shouts into the air until the mask was no longer theirs. Today we call them hoecakes, just the same, though it's all so bougie and designer sometimes, the soul food sutra for trouble in mind, I'm blue, but I won't blue always. I just can't stand a bougie black man planning dinner around the movie... lots of the rest are in prison or motor vehicles from dusk til dawn. I digress, we get a slang from it, hoes, raw cakes, didn't you know about all the black gods who only eat raw fruits and vegetables, backlash, backlash. Don't mess with us for too long, you may activate our super powers by accident you done us so wrong. Field holler for Thomas Jefferson. Field holler for Biggers. Field holler for how thick and proud it feels to not be blond. Field holler for... shhhh... we got so deep into the sound it healed us and we weren't even trying for such a heel. But now I see these detached bougie families, huddled around a television and some popcorn, I see them on commercials, I see them on our minds, and we need another celestial czar born say so what to our sorry excuses for progress and news; we need another Malcolm X to ask it plain, how does it feel to have made it to the sofa, from the hoe's steam to the sofa and all the slow cooked corn in iowa won't forget the bulging black knuckles stuck to its genome. We consume ourselves, and mash the pulp into magic.