Beginnings, Intention, and Method ( A poem for happy black men who pretend to be you)

He contemplates the famous suicides like dice ride across a juvenile desk, maybe desperation but more likely vanity or fear of change and love of change and the way the word rampant always comes up in a tantrum about too much or never enough of a man. Then he loops the songs that are better than his own into a pool of longing just like his own and it isn't wrong to bleed but it isn't when either, he moans, a coarse and unknown volition to make any sound and be alone with it, choking down another lightsource like feminine type of going rogue I think it's called, hope I know it's a silent science but it never contemplates death for sympathy, it could never be that selfish or misled by itself. I've never met another black man more afraid of answering his own questions or more capable, maybe, maybe so. I've met so many lately and Edward Said, because we must deal with the unknown, traps it in the kind of thinking that feels like dreams and wishbone cracking just right to home, the foment of a field of fraying puzzles possessed by the will for completion until their very joining is tragic and clumsy cards falling out of a shady dealer's hand. I didn't have to be taught to panic when everything gets too calm, it just comes naturally like in the dream in which I saw his hands his hands were white, he had turned into a white man, when he looked in the mirror his hands were still black. Illusions are never that mysterious, the tension between the thing you know and thing you believe, so subtle it bleeds all over the truth. Finally, when there is no glamor and no gun in the contemplation, when the story is all in the eyes and in the art like a sad child who still knows how to play though, if you ask right— life is so easy, that's what makes it hard

Asking the right questions (2)

Black American Psycho (notes)

I'm never sober and you neither// go to grammar for sweetness or to be broken again/\ winter wore on me like a local kind of common ennui is a word I like to use for everything and entertaining/I remember the tender age when I thought making sense was important like if I could just tell my story my story will make sense and how I'm still that age now and how the adverbs break to be emphatic like a perfect woman contortionist I couldn't dance for another (groove is in the heart) and I learned how to swim by drowning and how to sin by winning just like you, nigga/

Damn if I'm not a telegram again, a thing to be said aloud and silently too, a kind of living utterance and so utterly all the jealous ones line up to tell me what I mean, and all the stops make broad fantasies like the widest street in the movie with the narrowest red wing of a car and Miles at the wheel charging himself with a kind of theft you only wish we would look more tortured when we ride off into the sunset
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On the day you realize that the beast in you is alive again, having survived all of the cocktail parties and graduations, the advanced degrees and all of your artistic talent and all of your obsession with style and the Italian kind and the French kind and the African kind and the highball and the always be mine and the wise kind of malice that acts all friendly and gracious just to get to the way you act and break it and put it back together as the kind of desire to be who you are that we call blackness and are and as if all of our pathologies stem from love and maybe I'm finally blind enough to trust that again and every time I think a wimpy thought which I never do I want to apologize to my father and Amiri and hop on a plane to someplace where thinking and being are the same exact///change/  whatever it is that collapses as an attribution or rebirth when you learn with casual poise to disagree with yourself and become the classic I always knew you had it in you oh no you didn't diva of so what and I'd do it again too. When did it become ruthless to be yourself, suddenly I'm hugging Kanye West with wet eagles in my eyes and a tribal march barges onto the radio in token whispers. This wouldn't be the first time we re-invented god so many times he watches out like a nervous shepherd for the one runaway, the one even everyone can believe in

Constancy

Late Feeling (I heard that negro sing)

Karma and Somebody

When my father got out of the army he'd been trained to sing and kill, as if those skills were interchangeable or all within the range of a proud and so american, hold up, what the fuck am I doing here kind of agreement and argument at the same / when my father got out and became somebody they came for him screaming his songs into dainty little campaign eruptions and such beautiful cars and subtle too like japan rouge. But he hid his deepest arrangements in the velvet gun case and blew them to pieces whenever anyone slick knocked on the door looking for— The popular shit is always the saddest phase of a black man's fame on film or radio. Savor that shit though. It means you're the absolute best and jest is everywhere and you've adjusted so rare and wholly like you were there already in your mind.