Niggas in Fur Coats

I know you think it's funny that my ex is not a running back, but that nigga came running back.

Right. Absolutely.

Not all rage is dirge for greatness rages always. And not all dirt is the fault of the rider who tried to break the horse to make her into a breeder and then fell off, flying, enraged, greatly. What style he landed in! I don't trust a man who doesn't come in black and white. And we're all too young to know what black is. I don't trust any of us and become the horse bucking the tamer off my back and faster and faster I ran into everyone at that movie about the slave who thought he was the master. All these American tears, so well-behaved like imaginary fences and we can be that tidy again if only we discover where oppression suggests love and stop there for a day or forever acting like we remember the difference, recall, can be what it is.

He bleeds the way the moon bleeds too, in soft cycles from new to completely. He believes me when I say yes and make the leap into something else seem like a regular glance or gear or arguably the only thing left to be about. I keep shouting his fantasies at the top of my silence and they return to me as lived experience. That must be the power of denial and the power of love vying for another strand of dna, trying to clean our minds the easy way. Have you ever seen a man chasing a horse with a branding irony, walk away and disappear into the clear desolation of his own will, having finally outsmarted the ghetto of ideas and become himself or a better lie. I've been training my fantasies and they finally believe me when I say yes, and leap into something else, right, absolutely.

Love your enemy

Just in case it's you

I love to see graffiti

Sudden words like recipients guzzled up in bricks and brides, people you watch get high while they walk, and hide from for the rest of your lives, thinking I don't like his eyes but I like his art. Knowing it's the reverse and took hard water like me to carve the dam into your certainty, your fragile neither politic nor magic leading beyond the facts to the applicants for fact, so you wanna be a fact but you're still acting black? the caption taunted. A tiny please gasping for the corner or roaming around in a swarm of practical legends:

A king and a queen had fallen on some hard times

He had been using her name without permission

She stuck a tiny window in his left palm and suninhismouth and innit about time for the fire next time   I love to see you turn into wall/all our new words can burn through

Revolution is the Eternity of the World

The commitment to revolution is also a commitment to work, and study. Where are our revolutionary journals, and newspapers, and magazines? Instead we hear snoring, or the fashionable cynicism of the loyal opposition. ... It's just that we have to build our systems of struggle by struggling with the ugliness in us.  

Let it be done in beauty 

Let it be done in beauty

Let it be done in beauty 

Four-Part Apology (Electrified Blues)

Even my sins are apologetic /red   no read     the lines
I need you like the earth needed
the flood
and finally!, men turn 40     too   many times in   a   storm   that rhymes with   sister/wifeish  situation  or wanting more  and thenagain     if we weren't in this delirium the story wouldn't take place.  Not forgiven but never blamed. Not understood, but loved past the pain of understanding and for it and, always/yours. I could not endure having others tell me how to love.

A Pretty Good Person

How we got to be/a god

Some of us wanted to get home

In a daily way, prayed up and saying 

That's a lot of princes for one country 

and not offending the dream with its own image again/ no more shadow acting—

We started trading men like vices, admit it

I'm addicted water and liars, I'm addicted why we are/ a destiny, 

and trading war trauma stories or stories about being left by our fathers every lifetime

which started out romantic and turned into a gimmick, a white line on a kinder mirror than fate—

Some of  us wanted to get home

Inscribe the things we've lost the courage to say on the agents of that loss until

it's fame against fame again

niggas on the road acting like niggas on the road

eager and blasé ain't it, the way you shot your sperm into me and meant it like

Some of us wanted to get home

I imagine a time when love and violence are no longer enemies in order to reimagine my history and make peace with the ancient future again some of wanted to get home

I feel safe and alive and wait for me in that time with the blood and the bribe and the chicken running his insides toward the fire is more alive that we've ever meant to be 

Some of us

Wanted        home

feet in the air meditating ourselves awake like all the unisons . We met our son there and thought he was us backwards      home begging him to come back 

On the treatment of borrowed material

Low level street violence

My earliest memories of art go back to those years
When being arrested was a black man's rite of passage
When you couldn't trust anyone who hadn't been photographed in handcuffs with blood on his gaze
When my father's black belt got us backstage with Ray Charles holding his perfect hand while he told us how we looked in sound. Nostalgia just got lethal or always has been the one thing even renewal cannot cope with is how much better it felt to suffer than it does trust this freedom

A poem some people will have to understand

Thoughts of an old flame

The Abyss is Much Older than the Light

The Beauty of the Singer / The Pain of Switching Forms

Experts Say

He ain't committed to the beat you might say,

his tongue is the way

God just called

He says madness is getting big in Black America, as popular as ballers and musicians but we don't yet know how to call about it besides Quentin Tarantino and glowing white teeth and you go girl has always been my favorite pet peeve but it gets attention between revenge fantasies and ballet in the morning, classical turmoil, my life in pink and gold. Is it that Italians are better at re-imagining violence as a kind of salvation/glory/great redeemer redentor tour bus mirror and I'm the imaginary penny lane for every madman from poet to jazz head to hip hop edgelessness, and we're that one big modern family story less and land less and sensing one another as bandits were it not for when I ironed your name on my arm. We all have our theories/ equations/ clay radios. Something about the way we come together has falling apart built into it like a mandate, a helpless wake up call. How I'm never afraid to answer.

How all our best songs are about the fathers we never knew. Our imitation blues. That goes for all of us, even you. Must be why they're so easy to lose.

Use your words

That/ too

Confidence Man/ Confidence, Man

And while we sat around moaning about the disappearance of death, that nigga found him, sent him home

The New Mythology Begins to Love Me

With an immediacy that seems at once artless and profoundly sophisticated. You know how Billie Holiday sounds vague and precise like an unmarked grave that might your father's but he had another name for his disappearance, he called it love     eventfully shattered with enough of it

I heard black people don't get depressed, besides as luxury, and the bible says. What's popular now is the way the miracle of pure style cures or is it curses, crosses our heart, hopes to hide of what it don't get while new angels sing hexes into bottles of northern comfort. Uproar. Jesus, already these myths are obsolete too and fresh the cold details he was bleeding his twisted love into. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love.

Break on Through

Good lookin out

Chanson / Karma and Backstage

I looked at you and realized you do not know what you're doing, up there on stage alone like a babooning heavyweight saving his blood for the next coon phase/ of confidence, like the previous, was always delusion. Slow greedy pictures of dominoes. What a sequence/ this spectacle is/ criminal I can't look away from the crime scene, that 's some of our best work, the way it all falls into tension like a painting/ slow greedy skeins of dominoes falling upright/ But if he only knew how much I hate him, he would love me too, they prayed, reluctantly, a premature labor of dual feelings compromising the duel with real blood and chorus, and can sing too? Good too, like a southern brother needle in the voice girl Tuesday good. She thought. Like a witness and acted like a judge. As testimony he muttered the pop songs you're ashamed to love, the same ones that educate us out of sync with one another, if your girl only/knew/ hurling the trouble, simple trouble into some scarce territorial hush made of custody and slow greedy pictures of dominoes falling upright. The criminalization of blackness sounds polite, right about now. We are all the great villains we ever needed and our heroes are never clean or satisfied and our pride is a dandy in furs and sambo and we how we got to be so slow greedy pictures of dominoes falling upright. Psychedelic trauma, you promised the lights on the mirror wouldn't flicker and constrict round showtime, that we weren't the same performers from 50 years ago, our fathers and widowed mothers, chanting new songs in the old forms, the statuesque guts of old-fashioned music boxes spinning on the axis of our framed innocence, making it look easy.

And in the background always that strange voyeur in a tophat riding a slow horse across the hours

Adultery (3) Microtones and Shame

It's important to do the work that affirms our immorality

Adultery (2)

Satisfaction is just as unnatural as monogamy
for black people

Fool, I feel like we did this a few lives back (forth, clapping), died trying not to die of it so now Imma live like the prizes, on display, chest high and bronze as the ladder in my eyes on trial for its accuracy

Even MLK, is a great way to begin a someday/sin, when I'm in my clay/ sin being unreasonable and how can you relate when you ain't never been great/ when we're not even or event number anything but exposed/ anything but monopoly capitalism on the come up from a pretend slump
Rebellion, huh? That's what all the good women are up to in stories about their lives, even me?
Glee is pretentious when/ heroes grow evil in the bibliography (all those genderless names
ghosts in the range of killer angels even MLK 
but I feel good and rogue about it, like a fantasy about myself wherein you know the rest but can't quite, not yet anyways, believe it. That's what the truth is. Yeah, truth. We love you for it.  When we're lazy we call fear of that love, hate. Naturally. How we stay black/ and blue. With a squint in the tone when we say it even MLK. No wonder they never made a movie
good enough for all his love.

Borrowing your enemy's arrows

Comfort Girl

In the quiet difference between a runway eye and a runaway eye, the girlchild comes inside, by way of lace or literacy or mirrors or the early arrival of a clear 5th sun, here she comes, here she comes.

How many slaves believe in marriage?

It's right before the world ended and
we're still talking about slavery?

Will we learn to run again?