Ritual in Ice and Satin

What’s up with the birdcage    newspaper a corridor of   crimes and protests the layering will become as grotesque and limp as veils in a closet   still covering the heads of the devout imagists the palm leaf waving like a jester in the queen’s  court fanning her majesty because it was the winner whose head we chopped off  and the criminal we made a circle around gripped hands desperately and yelled his past good deeds   at him a violence of contradiction after which he was condemned to a life as a modest well-behaved   man that was his punishment for sacrificing his mother a life without mistakes a heaven with no hell america   with no enemy who cares enough to tear her to shreds

 

Gospel Album Cover Shoot

Slender faces   aren’t patriotic  so slip on a head   wrap play the reformed womanizer    terrorist. There’s something warped   about his smoothness. Are you going for the god is black    crowd or the one god folk. All I know is every friday is good this way.   Let’s stick to the evil that we know. Repeat when  blood    was shed    love was gained          And now for   big joy… his  playful child looks more  like a runaway slave,  smile a hundred thousand    for the return and capture       dead or alive

Do you think you were given a second chance?

I   slept  in the voice   of Edie Sedgwick  for a day depressed     rich naked taking to leotards    and stilettos stealing oaths from biblical  hoes making every would be elvis groan  like richie havens you’ll be a woman    soon a white woman a nightmare a dream       I was having a nightmare in which I became my mother and    then from out of nowhere she split off into her own double     and bit my hand I woke up

No such thing as   blood in America      

OJ’s hypothetical   confession had pet   the foxes into next night     a knife that bright Charlie   he called leader the mole above   every perfect set of lips at least mine,   these ones right here kissed deserted the    end of history her eyes were like tea cups   his were confucius about to weep in stereo      he laughed into a hose that sad snake nobody knows    nobody knows

I  still have   Abbey Lincoln    the last bloodless  name on the brink of   shaking loose

Did you  tune in?    I’ve lived   a mostly nonviolent  life OJ continued again    a nonviolent existence

And I don’t  know where I’d  be if she’d asked  me to try it the   white shit making slits in   her arms more nylons more   ways to match fabric with flesh        he went on if I did it you saw    the photos the hope of red in     a so blue whole made a family bold     accusatory is it possible for a black man to owe  a white man money even then is Halle Berry still paying  her white ex-husband 13 thousand dollars a month to say once   upon a time it was possible honey in a locket encapsulating the  last wing of the final bee whose battered pollen makes good memories  of the daffodil the infidel the ready teller go on rose strapped  in velcro

Did  you blackout?   I might have  he laughed half  timidly half aggressive as a       back up generator the Juice you   didn’t think I knew about Juice?

Black Rapunzel's Confession

Fetish, my favorite place         undifferentiated shades of paris    and wasted aristocracy on the fizzy  blond meat of their delusion          such approval in units called wigs or     gag orders one for all the nights of her  alltime youth and every lisping rooftop dizzy     with tuxedos and blow red lips and yellow afros pinched  into nylons and pinned down along the nape of a brown    skull howling in the shoulders of Jimmy’s guitar no castle     tall enough to unburden the coil or cloaked spiral of her intel         what she knows hidden under a bleached haystack that rivers her back like  the possessive fingers of a deadbeat husband she divorced some time ago but      he’s all in her hair all loose there all wet and civilized