Fetish objects will fight you

I finally have it in me to listen to Bessie Smith and Mahalia Jackson on a Saturday without an air of research tainting my heart. I'm so arrogant it works in every direction as a kind of innocence. Arrogance becomes innocence in me. It should be both easier and harder to cry this well, shame shouldn't arrive to replace ignorance without some kind of blaring recognition to mediate between them. I looked down at the display window because I'm in Starbucks, listening through headphones, the literal is stealing my nomadic language from its ambient wasteland and be glad, an album called The Heist by a famous white rapper and some plastic food named things like brownie and dark chocolate and I don't exactly blame my subconscious for re-naming the patterns that survive in it and access is trite.  I think of Bessie Smith's Backwater Blues as a kind of inverse middle passage universe I finally made it  far enough past and through, to enjoy, a fantasized entrapment wherein a flood could save us from being kidnapped by those sophisticated bandits but then I'd be impossible and the truth is over. (looking) us.  I'm in love with a man who can't remember how he got here until he hears my departing prayer, that's what she's saying behind that water, beneath its awful softness a dagger, she's paralyzed by her own prophetic jive on a J'ouvert style morning clay bent into upper nile alive in the coal, cold as a rival who disappears into the chorus, the shy curtain blues, the why come blues, the welcome home.