the boom to the kick and then in comes the improv to the moon, riding thick when the sun bows and dissolves
too soon the pulse quickens when the fun begins she said her sign is the twins, I’m trying to get in them skins
so I’m lying like I know about the horoscope like I try bending flow like I’m skipping rope
even though I hate the shallow like a misanthrope I play the rope-a-dope hoping to feel her cantaloupes
she say nuh-uh, you a Capricorn, yall’ boys are too uptight I said if our minds vibe right, I would beat the daylight
to her bedsheets, we could creep like TLC, or wile-out like Janet anytime, anyplace, I don’t care who sees us on this planet
she played me to the left, calling me thirsty like Rice Krispies but not being risky, she slipped me her digits, knowing she frisky
bystanders threw it in my face like I was vexed by her reply but I knew she was two-faced, just like all sexy Gemini ***
NaPoWriMo Day 3: basically, use Rhymezone and a random book off a shelf to create a palette of rhyming words to construct a poem.
This one didn’t grab me, so I modified it a bit, using both Rhymezone and a quasi-freestyle from words that popped in my head while listening to a 90’s Hip-Hop song (the one imbedded above).
It was pretty fun. Reminded me of when we would gather in hallways banging out beats on the walls while “passing the mic” around to each other.
I’ve been told that way back in the 40’s our Rosenwald complex was a black pearl on Chicago’s South Side during the blues, jazz, and soul renaissance.
It sheltered greats like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nat “King” Cole, Quincy Jones – girl, I said Quincy Jones!
I think even Miles Davis and Sammy Davis Jr, but no relation, I believe.
I’ve been told that black folks in Chi strutted down gaslit 47th street, danced on smokey Michigan Boulevard, sang on King Drive, and even Wabash like they owned the night;
with a sense of pride and musicality befitting us, inseparable from the music
spilling from every throbbing tavern, and even “hole-in-the-wall” was just a teasing nickname thrown at friendly endearing faces.
If I squint, I can see gilded hallways of way back when, which reek of pungent piss now.
I observe the sheen of polish on some of the tiles not defiled by dual-pitchforked, Star-of-David Gangster-Disciple gang-sign graffiti.
Or is it Gangsta? I try to discern the artist’s penmanship from the ones in our high school instead of
meeting your desperate gaze as you kneel before me, taking my hands in yours in a shameful proposal.
Just yesterday, I’d given up on you. I’d no tears left to cry over a girl who don’t want me no more.
Now you return, on your knees, perfumed in Bacardi rum and weed you never thought to share with me.
What am I to make of this?
You didn’t even respect me enough to break up with me; you ignored my pleas until I got the message.
Now you want to rewind the clock?
Any boy with a good upbringing and a residue of self-respect
would’ve slammed that heavy security door in your face for good, chaining, deadbolting, and security-pole in place for all eternity.
Sadly, this building has seen better days, better than I can imagine.
He spurned you as you betrayed me, you humbled yourself after falling, and try as I might, I just couldn’t kick you while down on that musty-ass floor.
I lifted you from your knees, welcoming you back into my self-loathing and desperation, knowing that I could expect no better.
I walked you home around the corner, across the dusty courtyard that once held fresh, manicured grass when we first moved in.
I held your hand in mine, thinking that to love you went hand-in-hand with my needing you somehow;
that without your water, my life was empty, dead, dusty-brown, a rusted, rotten swing-set without swings;
only tetanus would remain, waiting for antitoxin or inevitable condemnation
and abandonment, twenty years from now, long after our ill-advised marriage cracked, eroded and ended; long after you
kneeled before me once again, begging me to hold up my end of our sham, a plea met with silence and emptiness, like
the decayed ruins we once called home some thirty years and two-thousand sixty-four miles ago, before its renovation into an elderly citizen’s home,
which is fitting, for all things age, slow, decay, and are eventually consumed
by silence; even music – the most beautiful, the most vibrant; – the most soulful, the most mournful is fleeting, and always ends,
making way for the next, as star becoming nebula becomes proto stars.
I hope whoever walks that hallway now smells only lavender. ***
NaPoWriMo Day 2: “…write a poem about a specific place — a particular house or store or school or office. Try to incorporate concrete details, like street names, distances (“three and a half blocks from the post office”), the types of trees or flowers, the color of the shirts on the people you remember there.”
I tried to be descriptive, but I was eventually sucked into the narrative. I may try this one again after this month’s challenge ends.
a fly caught dead failing to conceive the clear pane lying ahead lying to him
dreading the lies I’ll conspire constructing in my head
which is a lie subconsciously formed before the first lie coalesced by will my dream lies
like the rug awaiting my shiftless feet and restless legs egging me on
that I missed the alarm by two lying-assed minutes dooming me to what lies in shadow two minutes ago
which was only ego yielding to id as I slid from lying to sitting grasping at evaporating nothing
warning me that nothing is as it seems even within the busted seams of interrupted dreams
that scream fuck everything when asked if I slept well as if I could tell time and reason from rhyme
and sure everything’s fine I guess but I digress let’s pretend we’re not because at least we’ll regress to a partial truth. ***
NaPoWriMo Day 1: “a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life – one that typically isn’t done all that often, or only in specific circumstances. For example, bowling, or shopping for socks, or shoveling snow, or teaching a child to tie its shoes.”
I’m roused by a crimson red sun streaking across reddish-brown skin nude, save for pale thigh, tinted rose, draped midriff, ignited by dawn. What on earth was in that merlot? Cherry-red lips mark morning kiss; my red-eyed world turns to meet them. Disturbed, pale-pink thigh shrinks from blush. What on earth was in that merlot? Scarlet kiss, ruddy thigh, opposed? What on earth was in that merlot? And I, red sun, caught between worlds? Trapped between dawn-reddened kisses my neck and spine tattooed in wine bracketed by lavish pink pours confusion yields to crimson want the cock crows rise with day aflame; I drown in cups of red again. “You touch me nice,” said your pink grin. “Me too,” said your cherry-blushed friend. But was it really the merlot? ***
since the very first link
interlocked with the first shackle
since the first othering
stillbirthed dehumanization
clinical rationalizing
reducing lives to fractions
since the first dividing for dividends
simplifying sturdy ones kept
from weakened, diseased stock
since the first grim reapings
of distant kin, then called savages
fearful souls denied empathy
by economy of the soulless
since the first casual cruelties
live bodies tossed overboard
to certain death, preserving assets
since then, we’re now civilized
rulers of the photon, electron
and enlightened electoral process
since then, we’ve shackled technology
harnessed the atom, the fossil,
the solar, and the wind
since then, we’re repeatedly shocked
by recordings of otherings
state-sanctioned slayings of our kin
in our own neighborhoods
as if the chain can’t be seen
winding back through relics
of collective suffering
since then, we’re now stunned into
soul-searching and handwringing
after electing the toxin from our past
to lead us back into the dark dystopia
from which we had never escaped
having never acknowledged
the forging of the first link
none of this is surprising
this is who we’ve always been
***
Just after his ill-advised drunken roughening
of his eldest child; a traditional, time-tested
tempering of adolescent ebony male steel
for a blackened, heartless, aggressive, manly world,
as was the loving intent lovingly lent to me
from him, a scruff-grabbing, face-slapping heirloom
passed down through generations of blunted mentorship.
I spied it briefly,
but it was there behind the noxious bravado,
deeper than dreaded defiance compelling him
to press his preteen into a flinty real man,
despite whimpering protests from soft, weak women;
yielding aunts, sisters, mothers wielding empathy
like mewling wussified consolation prizes
world-weary women who ironically knew well-
enough real pain to know better without having
to see it; who could blame them; they’re only women.
They don’t know what it’s like for a modern black man
to be crushed by callous strangers in a hard world;
only the intimacy of a bone-rattling
thump in the chest by a trusted father-figure
can prepare a young black boy for a crapsack world;
accept this gift in stoic silence, pay if forward,
and you best not shed a fuckin’ tear, young-blood, ya hear?
Yeah, I heard the words, and my chest burned, and
my face stung with blood flowing to the cheek-
capillaries of the light palm-strike, and the
lump in my throat sought exit in a sob
I denied, but in bracing to breathe, see,
there; I caught a glimpse.
“See? He ain’t hurt!” crowed dad, like a boss.
“That’s my boy! I know my fuckin’ son!
He ain’t no bitch! Ain’t that right, lil’ nigga?”
But when he asked for my co-sign, that’s when I saw it.
I saw it for the first time firsthand; buried within
the recesses of his whiskey-soaked eyes were hints
of its depths; similar scenes like this played, replayed
countless times over generations, his mentors
daring him not to cry after betraying him
with brutality-as-brotherly-love, calloused
hands hardening him for a world of hatred and
intolerance, his mentors’ elder brothers, uncles
delivering the same painful, loving lesson,
perhaps extending back to the days of shackles,
whips, toiling under another man’s burden
who saw us as less than three-fifths of a person.
Within that instant, that fraction of a second,
I saw in father’s eyes, a gaping, festering
generational wound not soothed by gulping whiskey;
my father’s pain leered at me across decades,
bloodshot and vile, that tough-love message twisted and
mangled, much like our very ancestry.
“Don’t cry.
Do not cry.
Not here, not now,
not ever.”
“If you cry,
I’ll give you something
to really cry about.”
“Don’t you dare fuckin’ cry, boy.”
“A real man don’t cry.”
“Bury your pain like a man.”
“You better not cry, boy.
The women are watching.”
“Please don’t cry, boy.
If you do, shit,
I might cry too.”
“If you cry right now,
I’ll cry because you’re in pain,
because I caused it.”
“If I cry because I’m the cause of your pain,
then the cause of what I’ve done to you
will amount to absolutely nothing.”
“If you cry and then I cry,
then that can only mean
the way we’ve been told to live our lives
is just a bunch of bullshit.”
“If we cry right here, right now, together,
then that would mean compassion should’ve been
our strength, that yielding was the key the whole time,
that the words ‘behaving like a woman’
should never had been wielded as an insult,
and every man I know and respect
completely missed the fucking mark.”
“Please don’t cry now, son; don’t give the world the satisfaction.
Let’s save face together.”
I blinked back tears, willing them not to fall,
and painted a defiant smirk on my face.
“Naw I ain’t hurt, dad!
You know you ain’t raising no girl!”
Father playfully tussled my hair,
knowing our secret shame was safe,
brittle spirits hidden in plain sight,
now hardened for an unyielding world.
You are my favorite song
prolonged by our lifelong sing-along;
the seemingly ringing
random sequence of beaconing
notes bringing me in ungainly,
unacquainted, yet infectiously
groovy set melody
that soothes and threatens to
relentlessly bring me
blissful expressions;
you are this to me
as well as destiny
of warm contemplation;
the un-played keys
that say everything,
returning it;
the indeterminate rests
among joyful-singing notes,
reaffirming its depths,
gasping for breath between
belly-laughs by the lungful;
your barely half-measured
triumphal treasure
fills impassioned sensations
with blasphemous pleasures;
ears favor your treble,
bones savor your bass,
and touch yearns for your encore.
***
Hephaestus’ Waste & Cosmic Rubble 