But back to Little Boy Blue, his eyes are closed, he’s holding two roses. One Pink. One red. His mother, above him, has the most beautiful calves and the hands of black rapture as she readies more flowers that her son might fit around King’s casket. That’s our king! Fetish objects will fight you, and keep winning. The satisfaction in this young boy’s eyes when they flutter open is not sinister yet, not stolen from forgetting, not a fetish of his stylized shame yet. Shame gets styled as devil-may-care, wild cowards. See Kanye West. See namelessness or corner’s best hard liquor. Obama fried chicken. Twerk competition. Nor is it an accident, that this violence is also peace. That one black man gunned down on a balcony in Memphis turns into this beautiful boy kneeling in a heap of our freshmost roses, humming the loose notes to a blues called : I want my oppressor to save me too or the deepest condolences of the American people.
Tradition is not what we think it is. Do we think it is? Kawaida a little. Dusk wilts. The Sun kills questions. There are no seeds left in the watermelon. The women who eat them will be barren also. They want their oppressors to save them too. Digression will be the most fertile substance. Left. Yes. Our legacy. Yes. Listen to jazz /again. Against what light! Our native language. Our only language. A sin/tax of digression, of falling apart and coming together with new intentions like the sun’s best muscles. Tropical Truth. Tradition is not what we think it is. Do we think it is? The tradition of leaders in the sun with their killers. The tradition of mistresses weeping on Monday. Wives burning grease in a vindictive slum. And someone always wants it to be Christmas. The time when everyone wants the king to live. And everyone but the King is living/ the way our king didn’t want to live. On our knees in these beds of flowers.
In a time of crisis, the mundane will become heroic again. It will matter that you know where to patch the water and how to work this barren land. How to pretend you don’t need to the man when he’s with his children and still feed him the hunt when he comes for it again. How to trim the stems at an angle and hand them to little boy blue without tensing your beautiful calves toward the hint of infinity in them. Our blue boy is heroic in a time of crisis. Do you recognize him? He lives the way our king hopes to live, on his knees in a bed of roses, coveted, raided with mercy, a warning pointing in every direction at once, our getaway totem halting beyond the frontier of revolt or —
