Black Happily Ever After

I spotted these floating prayers in the territory of headlines      blind and quick and imbecilic and sometimes even  a chipper word like zoom or lurch we blurted   our desires there and with nothing left to do but become   them the water is very busy the ice age is really sending     Radiohead is really numbing my patience while l get these braids       Sunny is really deep in the Rainbow Trout at the sizzler buffet humming   the happiest version of I’ll wait for you and next I’m going to comb the Delta for   anyone with no last name

Not  that I  had fixed  my mouth to say his  fix in oil

Not that the owl   was any more of a totem   than both Reggies

Not that I had  chosen one

Aretha Franklin, Precious Lord, April 1964

Pastels and paper fans and the Sambo candle fainted into blaze and then Fanny did. Tantrums of ignition and perfect pitch made the morning moan. We know church, we know all about it. The sweat on every forehead catches river esque glints of being sworn in, having taken an oath, no body knows what for.  The reverend is dead but still growing like hair and nails, a grotesque resilience in his song extends his tenure on earth as hers. No one watching is crying but everyone’s rapidly blinking into scissors that wink like owls and whimper like wolves and I want to hear her hunt the owls to sing to the wolves with their cutting eyes— like a pride of lions nudging my banner of nerve, she lends me religion. Will we lose our nerve and return to nature and call that finished assimilation another miracle, and then do it again like wheels and origins. Like a tribe of banshees I call this respectfully faith. Coretta is our best luck in black and red, her beauty is the only kind I trust, tentative, sure, every reluctant glimmer more alluring. Somewhere a family of dolls is stashed in a cave of our letters waiting to be saved. Do you do voodoo too, he asks. Do you?  By now her gloves have choked the stillness out of endings. By now her scream has come up for air swinging. Take my hand.

Maafa, what's the rush?

He  wrote Black   English I  read it as Black    anguish plain as gangs   and

He’d   written   Black English   but I saw Black   anguish on the page  plain as strangling an enemy    in a dream

It says   Black English    it says Black anguish    

The  confusion    plain as   gangs mugging the interior           the intruder the wish    the angst the hot rain in   the hottest summer on earth the    lava of leaving a language for   its feeling by the time it registers        be laughing so we write black laughter and    the word slaughter has no refuge we do this    in a hurry the money is made of cotton the apples    are made of johnny the anguish is gushing lawns and soft    overripe lemons and you might drown thinking of that yellow brightness       you might see the calm of hell on earth and pull up a lounge chair      you might own some tall whispering trees you might be angry but not angry    enough to return them to what you call the wild He wrote wild I saw     a child learn her first lie Such horrific calm we want to caress the mistress in ourselves      we want her in black and yellow we want to kiss her shy anguish as it shifts to desire     

Her Intimacy / Maafa gives you your problem back

I’m not asking you to play Cleopatra and Liberace        that act is too bulky and very cynical worldly  people might even think you’re joking or lift    your armor looking for armor and even find it along  with some bullet dimples I just love what a mouth   does in rain his face after the arraignment his wrists   after the shackles, so soft so swollen and cold roadless blue   eroding and the baby crawling across the alphabet we made that     from the center of the trap we built this life It’s just way more   eloquent than anything to let yourself smile about it the market would call   your enjoyment meaningless but say it with me all these captains of industry    are thieves! and today we took a walk and laughed erratically at the damp lenient   scene, the chemtrails touched like rainbows, hugging, posing vibrantly for the conspiracists rubbing  the sky with their filth He asked why isn’t that water beneath us moving? And we laughed   all over again, heavier, more sorrowful. It’s a toxic waste dump, all the sludge is rooting it down like anchors  and husbands, I explained, and we kept laughing uncontrollably as we walked the needling water

Maafa rubs some ribs to spices

He says acumen, she says charlatan      the charts with the lavender tint    depart from madness like responsbility  does in theory showing up on time   is sane says he’s fine and she’s mellow

       He says ruminant  she says balloons     send the statue to   heaven on red balloons     it’s so stiff it crumbles  midair and some stellar dna          reaches the tourist pretending to   be jesus now he is

She   says hourglass   he says forever     shoulders pressed to  the water talk to   the money changers tell   them this wealth is bland        and restless limpid or else so   intense it crawls on all fours and then   claps for itself

Let   the bells    let the blissed  out elisonian bullshit       let the elevator operator  with the shoe shine kit let   the idea dictate its bias      as you walk it to bed on stilts       with this child in your belly

She   says   easy she    says I miss  my uncle Charles      and I’m walking high    as he goes to grin

When his center was filled with venom and he asked her to drink it

A dumbfounded   anemia that forcibly materialized    in stenches and stingy lies    only the girl versed in wandering  nuance could perceive when it oozes   and the ooze of it soothes me like  indifferent sunlight that came from roosters      to the huge breasts of exploited waitresses trotting    back and forth between people who like the sound of  ice and guitars are you pressuring divinity into   obscene vanity because you’d miss a chilled glass and a lamplit   booth upon loosening that grip on strip malls strippers barbecue      another skewer goes right through your palm for emphasis are you gonna clean    that up?