When the rent is due
Poetry is three-quarters useless
flashbacks of straight A’s and expired milk
half of the apartment building rotating in and out of the hospital
twenty-nine years old begging my father not to return to his cell
History moves poor people too. And our very own voices come and visit us
Our very resolvable frustrations of a softer light stream
In which the eye is a beautiful underbelly sometimes
And even unjoined has a song to play
We are born in captivity
admirers of lightning
Our share of the soil mainly psychic and personal
River in a medicine pouch
Pendant of a tent
Harlem punting the sun
A child looking out the window counting thorns like flak jackets
talking numbly to God or even too late…to the ghost of the entire universe
a calculus that has grown deep like the rivers
Did fingers do all of this feasting?
Where spitting up a little blood
Is like tasting a little food
And I was forced into the common images of a prison society
the Madonna now white and male
on the moon
Hail, whitey-petit-bourgeois waxing over
precinct hanging fruit
Agnostic to genocide
Mindfulness of prosecution
Streetlights setting inner-city mountain time
The dry air of self-assault / a decision of tone and persona
Loveseat for sunset / attempting to look out the window and see the human family
Industrial observations of the slave trade
A Black man under pressure
The drunken yawn to Damascus
To spear-edge husbandry
Attica bragging, the color of the cop killer don’t matter
A theory about dreams
An experiment with the dreamer
On a turtle island (as in sense of touch)
Like at this desk in Harlem, diplomacy was achieved in the cosmos
And I can have old friends now
Variables of voice…bare my soul in a way God has never seen