What picturesque fugitives

Sometimes drummers   are taxi drivers   hunched clean in the banana   yellow ones the unanimous ones     

Don’t lie to me.

Sometimes I wanna ride in his taxi  and talk about the meat-packing factory his parents own in San Juan,  how it flooded of Maria how it gets to Camelot or Washington  Heights where the family owns a grocery store, haven for the locals.

Let’s go crazy.

The rotten meat can be salvaged   with the vials of soft blood and dye   in the backroom freezer. Just inject it like a sleeve of vaccines        look away play something drastic sell it downtown    we’re headed to Wall Street with the reddest lamb these executives  have ever seen.

Don’t  try me.  

Sometimes  I’m the one    on the tambors  beating them like   I’d whack a slaver   with my naked hands until  they bleed and I bleed   making the dandies hungry for   something lethal

On either side of the emancipatory project

Mine

He will become a kind of revolutionary        a superior and dedicated gangster I dangle   it in crayon the skin of  my imagined

Petty shrines on the spines of wands  that say I’m finally tending to  my true cravings

I crave   a heated    blue a chemiluminescent  human naked in his own   dayglow

The  taste  of sea   and peaches   

The taste  of seeing peaches    

The  dried  blood after   he punches and   we fuck I burn    on the alter and it   becomes such candy

Coated     rainbows like   the one over the    swamp the day we   met the jokes about   dirt and heavy petting

The taste  of swamp   and palpitations       and peaches so fuzzy     so fussy so neat

The Primordial Ingenue

I have these epiphanies   they’re strangling the world    jejune and the lion’s mane mushroom   invents the shame of hanging ice in the sun        an impersonation of the nerve of a lion    an animal that sleeps off its kill like   earth will sleep us off I had this very weird    experience in my garden then, the   sweet obsolete mercenaries we call bees had congregated in the space where a black bear had scratched a tree and they were sucking the rotting  log the soft wood now a fungus gave them enough honey to drip from the neck of this broken birch bloody yet tickled  with the low rain of its own temptation to mend when the rot is our immune system new to ancient beauty trying to   grow a blond and abolition foolish I lash out sometimes and touch madonna’s stolen children with an unplugged hot comb   to make sure we’re breathing like virgins

The bees     when finished  feeding flap   their wings until  their wings are shredded     and collapse into scarabs

I have  this bouquet of their last  hallucinogens it’s chewing    on my cousins kneeling   while they moan

Black Happily Ever After

I spotted these floating prayers in the territory of headlines      blind and quick and imbecilic and sometimes even  a chipper word like zoom or lurch we blurted   our desires there and with nothing left to do but become   them the water is very busy the ice age is really sending     Radiohead is really numbing my patience while l get these braids       Sunny is really deep in the Rainbow Trout at the sizzler buffet humming   the happiest version of I’ll wait for you and next I’m going to comb the Delta for   anyone with no last name

Not  that I  had fixed  my mouth to say his  fix in oil

Not that the owl   was any more of a totem   than both Reggies

Not that I had  chosen one

Aretha Franklin, Precious Lord, April 1964

Pastels and paper fans and the Sambo candle fainted into blaze and then Fanny did. Tantrums of ignition and perfect pitch made the morning moan. We know church, we know all about it. The sweat on every forehead catches river esque glints of being sworn in, having taken an oath, no body knows what for.  The reverend is dead but still growing like hair and nails, a grotesque resilience in his song extends his tenure on earth as hers. No one watching is crying but everyone’s rapidly blinking into scissors that wink like owls and whimper like wolves and I want to hear her hunt the owls to sing to the wolves with their cutting eyes— like a pride of lions nudging my banner of nerve, she lends me religion. Will we lose our nerve and return to nature and call that finished assimilation another miracle, and then do it again like wheels and origins. Like a tribe of banshees I call this respectfully faith. Coretta is our best luck in black and red, her beauty is the only kind I trust, tentative, sure, every reluctant glimmer more alluring. Somewhere a family of dolls is stashed in a cave of our letters waiting to be saved. Do you do voodoo too, he asks. Do you?  By now her gloves have choked the stillness out of endings. By now her scream has come up for air swinging. Take my hand.

Maafa, what's the rush?

He  wrote Black   English I  read it as Black    anguish plain as gangs   and

He’d   written   Black English   but I saw Black   anguish on the page  plain as strangling an enemy    in a dream

It says   Black English    it says Black anguish    

The  confusion    plain as   gangs mugging the interior           the intruder the wish    the angst the hot rain in   the hottest summer on earth the    lava of leaving a language for   its feeling by the time it registers        be laughing so we write black laughter and    the word slaughter has no refuge we do this    in a hurry the money is made of cotton the apples    are made of johnny the anguish is gushing lawns and soft    overripe lemons and you might drown thinking of that yellow brightness       you might see the calm of hell on earth and pull up a lounge chair      you might own some tall whispering trees you might be angry but not angry    enough to return them to what you call the wild He wrote wild I saw     a child learn her first lie Such horrific calm we want to caress the mistress in ourselves      we want her in black and yellow we want to kiss her shy anguish as it shifts to desire     

Her Intimacy / Maafa gives you your problem back

I’m not asking you to play Cleopatra and Liberace        that act is too bulky and very cynical worldly  people might even think you’re joking or lift    your armor looking for armor and even find it along  with some bullet dimples I just love what a mouth   does in rain his face after the arraignment his wrists   after the shackles, so soft so swollen and cold roadless blue   eroding and the baby crawling across the alphabet we made that     from the center of the trap we built this life It’s just way more   eloquent than anything to let yourself smile about it the market would call   your enjoyment meaningless but say it with me all these captains of industry    are thieves! and today we took a walk and laughed erratically at the damp lenient   scene, the chemtrails touched like rainbows, hugging, posing vibrantly for the conspiracists rubbing  the sky with their filth He asked why isn’t that water beneath us moving? And we laughed   all over again, heavier, more sorrowful. It’s a toxic waste dump, all the sludge is rooting it down like anchors  and husbands, I explained, and we kept laughing uncontrollably as we walked the needling water