Dear Abbey,

I began praying in Paris. I prayed for at least ten years straight. Sometimes in public, when the brothels were full. Once upon a time they owned slaves/nowadays they rent them. I loved those men. It has nothing to do with Africa. Or a harp in the nightclub. We're here to protect property, not lives. Plots, of storyland and rate times time equals distance. Standards. But that was a coincidence of the metaphysical world, also. I can hear you swallow into the microphone when he leaves in the middle of the show. That's part of the song. We did what the music did, it's true. No truces. Locusts and doves,

You were a philosopher
You were a polygamous woman
You had the courage to defend yourself
It's always been like this
So if I had never met
anyone but you,
I would have known which way to go

Studies for Voice

My Eyes Already Touch the Sunny Hill

Three Species of a Secret

(2) Convincing

It was focus that broke my kaleidoscope (now I'm less careful). By the time the riot subsided, a diagram of how-high-the-moon and the indiscriminate silence lifted into bloom/extinction. Two male Negros with walkie talkies. The losses by fires alone could be heard and spied across empty grocery... I'm applying to be on the cover of a cereal box holding an alto and a football and... the boss says I'll get a promotion if I lend him my image, he promises, crosses his heart, I can keep my teeth apart and every seventh portrait will be donated to the league and I'll never be lonely, he promises me poems and brightmoments' maps made of fire alone, I am. Lost. Nestled in his atonement is a limit I call limbo/lovecall/sambo's all-alter-lap/ a pale slapstick myth we get deliberate for your mind did set me ticking like a fat gold watch but that doesn't mean I'll offer you what time it is, nor that I'm looking for you in the caustic leap across myself, I refuse, I'd rather be anything than a duty, in other words, I am three, but the lens lied as well as he did, just as well, no melody is steep enough or narrow enough to see up these skirts of us. So we burn our own road, so we build it over again, the same way, a tired trade. The man I love is very boring and predictable, not tall, half handsome, almost famous, insane, perfect almost, cruel, bashful, less and less special except for what he keeps to himself and keeps calling by my name

(3)

My Familiar Being/Unrendered

She climbed up on his lap and said/she wanted to play/ little/ black sambo/and he was the tiger/Dear jungle doll, he answered/watch/I'm gonna make a million dollars just talking/saying heliocentric things/apollo things/being the boogie/man/booed off by the boogieing dandy/she began to clap and wail and frail words ran out of memories wherein to store themselves/she wanted to pay little black sambo/and he was the rider

What is all this joy and justice

An Introduction to Non-Fascist Life

Stunning (a tumbling suntan, lanterns under my skin, come Sunday...

He stays worshiping. That's slang for running (running things), in uniform, entire mornings underwater) Oh captain, my captain I have never trusted you and now the rebellion is as fast as life

Both scoops of the parenthesis turn into slings and bend. An absolute. My sister is turning blue, in fact, the fee for water lit her soft blood to suffocations unknown to the podium but dumb enough to stand there submerged in its most limber rant: I am a constant soldier, an allday poet, and I will be king. Numb to gender, numb to nonsense, numb sincerity, wisdom works against us when it's for hire, too rigorous, too calm, too now that you're familiar with the diagrams: 8 is what the wheelbarrow does, 1 is us, 7 are the syllables missing from love and death and trust,4 to the left, the ones that keep us susceptible to contracts (like) marriage and music, there he is, the unnamed authority of the unexpected showing up while we clap with crime scene gloves on, suspicious, glad, fingerprints, clasp-prints, uneven headshots, belligerent leisure, a product of the truth, a threat to the truth, and then there were 2, it was too distracting, being understood was way too distracting

Panorama in Miniature/Shine vs. Shine

Secrets become agreements, myths from Griots' lips, grievances, givens (man keeled over at the railroad station is waiting for his woman's train (to arrive) on a discontinued line... he is very patient, do not pity him, there is a phase of love coloring his heart to blind and giddy, he rhymes with himself and can you do that, can you lean that over... it suddenly recurred to me, to whom who keeps a record, weather at the strip club or the red party meeting, or here waiting, all of these are part crimson/ brutal. Each chimp is property and it belongs to grammar, each chump too, each chubby pole dancer too and emaciated streetwalker/socialist, day/night, all forbidden by silence, so what if...........



a wild pause for transport. Or trespass (I heard a song by the Stylistics (during it(during the pause) about You.... You Make Me Feel Brand New....disappear the barrier, disappear the Black Saint, disappear the Sinner Lady, stray laces in a TV supper club in a mafia picture... this is my family I speak of, in palaces and stations and clubs, greeting one another over the crypt victories or disasters, depending on whose version, and surviving
We all sat down naked under khaki trenches in the middle of an unpacked strip joint on the side of blackout highway and singing an anthology of by the way while I was singing I could tell we are no longer assigned to this movement we are now its functionaries, we have inherited its function, we have replaced grammar with a glamorous hush fell toward the room, but could not quite reach it Free these mimes from their mute imitations and they just dance a percussive speechlessness into our shut-in/don't shoot/souls... I sing to you. So you can shine some way. Home