Sorrow isn't elegant. I heard West Africans used to fast from speaking at all when they felt the rose of it come alive like talisman and medicine in them. Now we talk over everything like the time the earth fell apart we discussed it over dinner in hell, talked about the way our flesh had met a brighter tempo than destiny itself and carry on and carrion and suburban eyes gone wild in fret
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Next I'm lounging at a country club while my father picks cotton and subtle cane and invents hymns that mimic the sound like his body dimming the sun. You hypocrite. That's a private sound and it runs out of time to find its privacy. You sugar fix, you addict acting...
Next I'm in a field of blood hunched over a bumper crop while my mother takes a magnifying glass to the emerald to make sure it's real authentic gold mine off minor pay for what you get shades of mint for the way we dressed at Minton's, for the way we felt we were egyptian in the heart/captain. You hypocrite. The gem in your kiss is an idea about who looking belongs to and who needs to be seen. I do, I do it too. I want my hand to shine like ghetto music but without the casual pain.
In the middle a cult of pole dancers is troubled by the come-down. This yellow radiance is Sunshine they chant in blameful unison, accusatory, a little funny and pathetic at the same time like any assertion of something so obvious the words crush its truth. Stage name. Slave name. Is that you? Interchangeable crucifixions. Every night we threaten to quit but we're addicted to the abuse. It would be easy to die in this fire, prying the poison rain from its embers, but useless and uninteresting like correcting someone's very desire by proving it—Father's been promoted to shooting broken horses, such is his understanding of how love punishes the receiver first, he caresses them until they feel safe and then pulls the trigger so tenderly it feels like a hug or bedtime story, tell me another. Mother's become his first/mercy. I'm watching the polls with grand-pere and jesus is a suspect in the assassination of his erotic double chanting, looks like this yellow radiance is Sunshine while we fold the ballots into miniature fine and mellow robots. No matter how incredible robotic carving is, the hand is an element that you can't get away from. In the dream in which I saw my mammy, my mammy was white, she had turned into a mistress, when she looked in the mirror her heart was still chanting : this yellow radiance is Sunshine
