Wanted : high yellow black man who hangs like a red bone , not as in nooses as in pleasure dome blues fetish/ muse / whatever / well spoken in both protestant ethic English and vernacular knows when to use nigga when to use blood and when it's appropriate call his enemy brother in the most sincere masochism this is a stick up back up must black up like cousins on rubber bullet crutches after strutting down the tuck-me-in blvd of fatherlessness which is no longer an excuse and also impossible (repeat) Must baffle with poise and know only how to feign dejection, never truly experience it turn it into delirium and ecstatic austerity. Please, we are orphans, stand on the turnpike with your bullhorn and tell us we're born again, of kings and queens and how can it be that we've allowed ourselves to be ruled by the barbaric cruelty of these cowards, how can it be that our would be leader strides a borrowed bridge looking for his soul in an eclipse of token disciples who don't know how or what to call themselves. How can it be that we swell with fury until our hearts are mythic and elsewhere I woke up from the comfort of my nightmare to find a parody of wobbly gates we could swing from like a phase out of Atlantis under the demands of our near extinction I found a banner of gates that we can swing from like flags and brag and reminisce about when we had it like that those virile high yellows and the good luck microphones and the crowds and the titles for groups who would stay a while SNCC, Black Muslim, Panther, someone to name the spectacle, a man, a proud danger. And America resents our new imagination, it is all wrong, too specific. The freedom to love gets too close to the freedom to kill and they call the products of this: niggas / still / and we reproduce and cuddle with our mirrors looking for pointy things, and we become a city of gold crowns bobbing on the ocean surface hoping, just wishing you would come after us and trouble the mask/
what trauma, what glorious trauma, an act of perfect war, to love that man, that shallow leader, to love my country, to love myself again invisible like a proper soldier / property / slave - low in the cotton playing a rotten cello / pose / for me / baby, look at my shadow papa is no hardworking martyr in their grove
