Even the streetcars, including the heart, including the mind, including the nigga, yours and mine , who catches me wondering if male slaves were raped too, and points to a tattoo on the nape of his wrist, a droopy name I can't make out or distort besides that silence is another kind of yes in dreamtime or during a movie that just isn't sad enough to be true we got up and slow danced for a while, fell asleep in the shadows the picture made on the glass wall and dreaming of all the violence done one another in past lives, like bleeding, the dreams felt like bleeding the crimes clean and cosmic in their distance from the imagination they invented the imagination, then dispatched it to limbo where it waits for an ego and a form to hide in, to revelation, even a wish masquerading as a lie would be better than a bad movie. And when the light in me grows apologetic this way, I know better than to come any closer but I know not to move either. Frozen in the stance of a question like prey or almost-guilt in two directions at once we became that naive braid of American laziness: wonder, and not even shy enough to call ourselves propaganda anymore
