Raw Vegetables

At the heart of a royal happiness

Heroic Listening (Otisesque)

Act as though—

                           And a far cry from.


                                                What's closure?                                  


 All clever answers are guilt or lies.


                                                                                           And all I know is why

                                                                                 
  I love you


                   And my confidence in myths, and how a ritual outsmarts even its participants, especially its participants, and how James Baldwin might have felt in Paris, and how Richard Wright might have felt in Paris, and how Josephine might of felt in Paris, and how Bud Powell might have felt in Paris, and how Dexter Gordon might have felt in Paris, gazing at that quiet/tiger in the glass, and when they got high and the stripes made a chant that chased even themselves away.

What I'm trying to say is. And silence is a confession too. And the sun is turning blue as steeple copper. And that's green and vain of you, son. But the song I mean. The song keeps getting better.

I'll be your mirror

I make out crowds of angels

Their features scarcely traced, but in each mute and glowing face I see a solitude. And I call truth anything that continues. Everything that continues.

Show and Tell

Cause that's what niggas do

Who should be a superstar?

I tried not to walk in with criteria in my arms
and writhe like a nearing
and whatever that means, I tried to mean it and not mean it at the same pace. I tried to be the physics of nonchalance.  

Total theater. Bible folded into a fan and the canopy it made/made our silhouette more romantic, more of a trove, more of that do-it-yourself shamanism. More intimate and alien. Hold me. Closer. Who should read the lines, right from the teleprompter, make it look natural, sell the rights to the look for capital, trap the looose color beneath one cloak on a broken map? I had no criteria in my arms. I tried for a habit and found a glitch is better, like when Bill Cosby bought the Playboy Jazz Festival after firing Lisa Bonet for posing nude on the cover of Playboy. Where have all the great hypocrits gone? 

Are all gods martyrs? 
Are all martyrs faking it?
All all marks masks?
Is your art a sex act? 
Is your truth free at last?
I could get used to this.
Not in a trendy way.
But I love the questions that answer themselves. In a tender way.
And the men. I love the men who should be superstars but hide the good card in my hand.
Ace of spades today. L'ace to trefle qui pique mon coeur. Bent like a tunnel on his tongue of silence.

The first Hip Hop concert I ever went to was in Lyon, France. MC Solar in the open air shuffling and slurring about cards and hearts. That'll be more relevant later. About the way it feels to be sixteen translated onto stages, painted black, turned into music, another ghetto superstar you should be with and abandon.

Also, Optimism

Possessives

I didn't realize how much that broken man was affecting me
I once tried to put him back together again
But his eye was on his belly and I became his gaze and his hunger
Was a blank stare; Rage gave way prayer

But what is prayer
What is power
Push another button
Stare me in the heart
i/s what

I once prayed to my father for a father    father father father do you hear me

now

you're vulnerable, too


He would talk about how it felt to hold a cushion of sound in his fist and when he'd let it go his hand disappeared and here I am

He is not that broken, man,

that broken moan, stammering into I am that I am—I can handle the poem in his eyes, afterall

I didn't realize how much of an idea I am, all my own

Ford Commercial

Harlem, 1918. Four suit clad black men in a fancy Ford sedan, sobbing, guns lodged in their wings, the wheels wobbling toward revenge for when Eddie Murphy shot someone's brother. Now the cars occur like tanks on the road as they show up behind him to return— the eternal return. But he escapes. Like the sky. Dimmed to radiance.  He's innocent. Like I and I. Like the car. Shiny noir machine innocence. Like the courage to pretend. Fall asleep watching a movie. Wake up in the movie. Having seen it all. Ford the flooded stream. Don't cry. Drive and ride. Blood is everything. In the bible and the whole planetary scene. Detroit what! Queue the molasses acting jazz as we roll up as the sunrise.

The way we danced was like a shout in church

Sound can clean your mind

Reclusive Niggas

And the women who love them

Another Ordinary Arrow

Roadside dagger glowing with marriage, or
At least obligation, look up the word glib
in the sunlist-diction, another risen CNN sign in red diamonds of light and propaganda just beside the costume exclusivity of the Trump Towers, we own the land, bow like candle birds until it stands for us, and I'm sitting in this space-aged audotorium watching old men turn young on brass and risk and a glad tear traps my eyelids in their most honest pose, between confession and confusion where clarity intrudes as music. I could hide it, but I won't hide it. Wade in the water. There's no trouble there. Just a couple of misplaced words, and affections disguised as weapons so we recognize them
in ourselves
again.

Turn that Jungle Music Up

13 Ways of Being Your Immortality (way 10) The Reincarnation of a Lovebird

If the moon turns green
And shadows get up and walk around
Clouds come tumbling to the ground,
I wouldn't be surprised

If the stars turn blue
Willows that weep begin to sing
Winter changes into spring,
I wouldn't raise an eye

Because didn't you, just return to me