The Black Entertainer's Addiction Blues

The cause was heart failure, his dealer said in a monotone, bypassing the dreary eyes of his high yellow woman to address the electricity of these detached reporters. Many were playable like a record short a few rivets, lifted from their paper stacks by lackluster fixations on black magic and primal elegance. Looking for some jazz pathos. Dressed in squares and matchboxes for shoes, roses coming out of their microphones as though their aires are gravesites or battered wives on the comeback days, glaring at their shame, their shield form, how the inquisition parodies the first-garden-sin and all, even when I don't believe in sin and I am / coming into this beauty predicated on the unbelievable. He knew more about sheep that anybody, the dealer added. Maybe he's gone back to his boyhood home. He had planned to leave his family for a life of monastic hedonism in Morocco. He thought that would better than the yuppie hedonism over here with them. And that he'd return like a negro Ulysses, finally free of the consequences of blackness besides invisibility and hyper-visibility and fear of trees/ addiction to trees, my greatest joy is everything!, he'll exclaim at last, at least everything! And he'll exude a new kind of manhood, a kind of accumulation of the opposite of memory, a panicked salvation he knows can't last without a new myth. A numb alertness he will reject for the addiction that just killed him because life is eternal and karma is will and will is belief and your beliefs are generally exactly wrong, all the way down to the way your name sounds in a tunnel or when Monk plays Duke Ellington's, I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart and the regret feels wise instead of pathetic. This is a piece called Vigil. It's filled with taxidermy eyes and immaterial situations that look like the plastic rosary beads of god hungry reporters who need you to be a little bit more or less tragic and as black as your honey habit, half-hearted, raise your hand if you blame black angels. Trophy wives are important to the secrecy because they threaten it just enough, just like blame does, by traveling the radical color of our slowest needs. This is the barbershop mirror. This is a piece called It all got good. The sequence fears being too predictable so the barber and the reporters switch cadences and then cause and the effect are one like in fake love coming true, all it takes is a mirror/ stage and a play gun that's actually a wallet. Who would you be if you did not believe in death? The widow interrupts. Running out of patience. Running and numb. Looking to avenge her numbness with the scandal of her disbelief. That about does it, the dealer concludes, meaning business.