Cooperative

Propaganda and Promises

No way am I ever gonna talk like that

Pulling forgiveness out of thin air

For you who do all sorts of things
when nothing's there to stop you

The non-thought of received ideas

A man who loses his privacy loses everything. A man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

Keep America Beautiful

Even the streetcars, including the heart, including the mind, including the nigga, yours and mine , who catches me wondering if male slaves were raped too, and points to a tattoo on the nape of his wrist, a droopy name I can't make out or distort besides that silence is another kind of yes in dreamtime or during a movie that just isn't sad enough to be true we got up and slow danced for a while, fell asleep in the shadows the picture made on the glass wall and dreaming of all the violence done one another in past lives, like bleeding, the dreams felt like bleeding the crimes clean and cosmic in their distance from the imagination they invented the imagination, then dispatched it to limbo where it waits for an ego and a form to hide in, to revelation, even a wish masquerading as a lie would be better than a bad movie. And when the light in me grows apologetic this way, I know better than to come any closer but I know not to move either. Frozen in the stance of a question like prey or almost-guilt in two directions at once we became that naive braid of American laziness: wonder, and not even shy enough to call ourselves propaganda anymore 

Where blackness fits on the hierarchy of needs / take care of everything

And I feel like a million blacks

 running 

from the police 

could really spark the revolution just by turning around, running in the opposite direction, call it a stampede or Truth and Reconciliation or how the phrase we don't need no made Pink Floyd all that currency and comes from our sho nuff grammar of the plantation/ handcuff fitting your man better than any wedding ring ever did. 

Private Speech

My mother's dissipated in me, let's say, though it is untrue and lazy like a blue video on the shoulder of a midnight room in the red light looming, peeking through corners and stray headlights from the almost vacant highway, a trucker and my one true love, and the word you expect protects the unexpected like a healer or fate in a pleasant mood or the proven libido—I stepped into a ray of duty so wide it is a childhood. She leaped into a prayer so large it was a sacrifice. If I have outlasted my desire thus far, it is a practice / bringing me so near to my past, I am a myth. In the Latin myth means authoritative speech, the kind meant to silence women in the process of our transformations. We're allowed to announce only our victimhood and our motherhood, and the way they intertwine to make us petty and finite. But what if I said

He is flying blind and I am

right

behind him

Instead of the settled retrospect of how

--

As a child, I felt myself alone and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of and for the most part do not want to know.

--

And I keep catching up with my vision just as the vision changes. But I am flying high and he is right behind me.  It is important to have a secret. A man who has never experienced this has missed something important. And shame is finally excluded from the process of revival, an exclusion upon which everything depends