When the party needs us our hearts are filled with denial

Why are you listening to so much Rahsaan Roland Kirk, these days?

Because he is in a trance next to me and he looks at me without seeing me 

Does that bring you solace/completion?

That brings me to the picture of our father as a baby hanging from a tree   house with a guitar between his teeth 

Numb fascination?

I mean he obstacles himself to save us from his tenderness, which would crush faster than every weapon   and  when I listen  to the blind prophet hiss and sizzle into someplace vivid   it's as if the violence of slapstick and the humor of pornography rise to some still center in the midst of outrage and could raise us with them    

Were you looking to be punished, were you looking to be appropriated, were looking for a way to wade through the smoke, as lake?

Cop wrestles bikini clad black teen to the ground in response to speech act. I was looking to escape the strife that enters in the space between two fantasies   repose  black amour   an army of children waiting to be given wars 

The brutal fluidity with which rules change

In the middle future

Stardust  sign  
Our wedding on a phonograph record
Man arrested for hiding a knife  in his Christ / Chrysler/Bible (whatever)   blurry syncopated readership    let it be    all three   bells    bells     weekend  Elvis
Ford Foundation / bureaucrat  / guy named Thadius  they say, did he get out, lately?
Brutality and Remembrance, nevertheless   the eternal stranger     gets a lyric  commerce
still niggas  have  no leader    between   being   and beings   a little burlesque  thing     race concept   our country   ing     the  come to be   of the word  fecund   in the teeth      as honey   in the   villain

Sotto Voce       the last private  man    the  last  law of nature    encounter     hug  their own wounds   like           farmers    or John Wayne  hugging Sammy Davis Jr.    after they   trade   skins   in the mirror  / stage

It's not a natural  thing          to  go  some place     and to say      this is mine    

so they ride the echo down
pretend to get lonesome for a storm

To keep a human voice raised against the night

Ananda

Hypervisibility

In the parallel  I held a laughing perm and swarmed the classic skin bleaching ads for  Ethel Ennis   and all the girls who somehow misunderstood the promise   were chanting   no more death    no more heartache   no more                                                          misunderstanding     and  my tan was a fancy palindrome  for  their seedless rebellion     and once in a while hybrid eucalyptus   grows like dandies   and I'm  still obsessed with dandyism in black men and in the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live    which  was teaching them   how to die  and apocalyptic second coming  and I am unphased    which was why   they  stay    buying into every play siege  as a wideness/   thick tedious  lips / to abide then/  generous   dream  to teach  its endless germ   in the clean  way      and safety is clear   thinking and radiance  redeems   pretense now and then    and I'm again  making a tabloid   monument  to    us and them   and   us/again     The spectator must be allowed some distance    because  the difference   between innocence   and devotion    is a sudden one, sullen  one, sublime  hunter   see how we run some  light            Photo of Cornel West lunging into a crowd of uniforms   all   my unadorned  objectives    could I get abstract enough to rescue desire   from  fear   could  I get that   and is seduction   at last   militant