When mom fell in love with Dick Gregory I tightened my eyes and pictured a sled in the desert. Her in the sled. Me with the water. Voices like sheets of ice or edie sedgwick biting warhol’s neck til red soup commercial showroom warm with iodized salt. I’m all about the sea catching slave bills on the walls of these museum mansions. I’m always the leader the one who casts the heaping net of reckless judgment to say get away get better get a way I respect. Heckle the mirror of yesterday into a confession. Of what? What should it confess? This used to be a minstrel balcony before Eleanor Roosevelt read poetry from it, the sicilian tour guide reminds me of every failed hunt, every wild urge Get it, gurl. I might have said, to the mother, lovingly repelled and counting melted freckles that amounted to wounded suns. How’d I get so ruthless? How’d the edge get this close? Chuck D said nobody is safe when he strangled William Buckley on that desert sled. I promise I rather be deserted than situated opposite a rehearsed pledge of human faithfulness. Stevie’s fulfillingness plays and balloons pop right on the sand, and pop mutiny, righteous and shrill, I’m better than this, I promise I’m better than this, he promises. Don’t look at the eclipse don’t touch its sizzling driftless scissor burn. That tolerance is reckless haughty upcycled crest of lost or overworn love. I can’t stand the way she sucks fruit not my mom this other woman meant to be a friend I can’t stand her voice on entering a new room and the way it pitches up in search of attention and acceptance, and anyone who tries to be cute, I can’t stand them. And the man I love I want him to adjust his shoulders and become Malcolm X or Miles before he hit. Tie around the elbow. Me on my knees in front of him, not in supplication but in supply and demand and aching oneness. And as for the framed bill of sale of a slaveboy called “Mink” on the wall at this castle we toured like hungry mice, I can’t stand us. Our famine our dumb hunger/ I’m using my stomach muscles to sit coldly on the hood of an eagle and heal my perfect heart. Here’s where I start to stammer here’s where the plan to murder false intentions arrived at while on my back with legs spread in happy baby, squeals like a victim I am not the victim here I know one thing from another I can soften my eyes and look up I can ask the five men pointing to heaven why they killed their brother but I know they think by now for love I can soften my eyes I can burn the bible while I recite it I can be that unfussy I can shrug instead of boast or resist but I won’t not for nothin
