Ritual is chaos again like in the zen/ ancient when morals fail and need containers as dumb as
any festival of threats and prophets and what about our nightwatchmen what about our drop
squad retaliation anything counter–insurgent besides black beauty besides looking the way the soul
keeps in the new drip with the pretty gold yarn and rivets accenting a militaristic
blue the new crisis on the loose a stray holocaust a Maafa who killed her
father to save the clues that he had begged her to needed her to Legbaed her to do it
in thankful accomplice blues— she’s coming back for you not that the new tenderness
is her topography of bruises and backlash but that admitting she has this name
is to give her this matter as body this eternity of renewal as functions affections
afflictions check his coffin check all the coffins you’ll find some instruments
heavy organs and chapped brass floating on spindles of bone you’ll find a craving
for loneliness that almost feels like suicide except it is the strongest will to live
beneath this flippant surface and hovering and surging you know the vampire story
once bitten you have the urge the bite back forever the murdered become the murderers
forever haunts forever the blood thinks and shares and its whistling confessions infect the stroll
the sense of lane and Maafa travels through sure green time in the matter of fact
valence of a really good girl a good black girl a luck of curly yellow a perfectly
beautiful woman an annotated ruins
The kind you weep for in Detroit make into a nightingale nightclub supermercado isolated
warehouse the kind you gutted again and again just to get inside and when you
realized that you’re trapped inside the wish to get inside a nihilistic interior bride weirder
than perversion is true sweetness a drunk hysteria of repentance and imperial butter you’ll
have to go through her to cut and slurp and survive
Are you a survivor? They kept asking like the answer would mean something like to
track down Maafa you have to find every survivor every certain Detroit every
worried marketplace about to brand another black first
What did I survive ?
How did I make it out of a crisis with no name? How did
I claim the body nobody claimed
What you cannot call you cannot kill
Maafa Ma a f a Ma a f a are you a survivor are you a survivor?! shut up
a lot of us be still be still be still
Have you ever been so done you smear the cover in evil money smirk and rumble bounty
pon the grief. In gris gris green and offwhite spacing black letters pout Revolution Parts
I and II. Nina wears all noir bare legs and high boots touches her finger tips together like
a luminated mafia and who do you know so lethargic electric equipped to stare you into
oblivion venture and make lethargy erotic as plenty obelisk seated freckles on a never wonder
pendulum
Mica sparkles the rubber way he rubs away his urge & who’s in charge of the trouble
slaves
We sure are a burden deep in the earth’s discharged mica sparkles coating
A box of eyes in spazzing gold I grab the sound of August Wilson naming men
ashamed of women they love the same and how they paint and pant a sloping
lung
A man I trust his teeth glow gold a little musty adidas but I trust it when he
Says you can call almost anything pneumonia in an autopsy fluid migrating from
breach to
Breach a rock in one hand a hammer in the next make that sand golden,
child
And my eyelids bright underhyped moons scoops of slave labor swooning on cable
My stray gold environmental activists are the first to get killed the spyware froze when I wrote
her name then the healers
And jesus types then the housewives then the liars then the babies then goodbye
Ida b. Wells and that telethon praise dance where it felt redeemed to be mellow
atrocities in drastic sleeveless and call on a lot of elvis aaron davis diva maybe
decency divided
Me into phases of telling or maybe I was petrified to know that swell
Is coming & when to duck in the brush & when to hush my shiver with mothering
When to be so mean you lie and it keeps you alive because if they get their scent on you
like An animal
I will eat you alive I will eat you alive get out from underground
give up digging round the glimmer it’s a rim of weapons inside your very
service you servile little bitch sick with hesitation and the painted faces of your
enemy
you love someone you don’t even know
Ok so you like Flamenco Sketches you think romance will cure your evil you think I won’t kill you
in a pretty dress and heals like I killed you in an auction field my hands having made those
movements on the machine for so long they kept on even when the machine was gone nudging the trigger
little nigger girl gets white dick the header read she nudged it some more even the pornography
is sick with contrived whimsy sea sick as I was seeing him for the first time dismembered in
the glove compartment what a lucky ghost story we were slaves now we’re free
Interrogation skimming for prayer or priestess M a a f a was named after the Black Holocaust the way Effie was
named for euphemism or the feet of black notes falling from the last cracked tongues of ancestral spirits. She is
named after a mass drowning. She is named after certain blacks, the ones still limboing on the go, so many
limbs for no hearts to show the blacks who shout don’t blame me while they slit your throat, Ma is their naming
a punishing beauty. The smiling ones you never knew were as mean as their shine. And Maafa is a killer. Could
you blame her? Don’t blame her. And she’s been to a couple of Rage Against the Machine Concerts. And she agrees
with Foucault, guilt is so dumb and immobilized like judgement. And she still thinks of Anthony Dodson. Hide your
kids. Hide your wife. And hide your husband. She is petite but don’t let that fool you. She killed her own father but
she did it for love. Let love fool you. It’s hate too, rage, expiation, blue movies, red ones, dumb amputated
readiness. She can’t remember what love is for though if it doesn’t save you from killing its objects or
pathetic surrender. Love is M a a f a when she forgives somebody and herself. Tell her that love is
greedy she will tell you she has everything but the ego death that makes greed unappealing. She
wears green on Fridays a child of venus. She likes the way the earth tastes when it’s dying
she likes to lick it and call it a liar
First come over with a cooler full of sandwiches. Hunger is so premeditated and Schopenhauer wears white
lace yesterday on the maple bench. Send the mouth to music bust out the Easter suit send
Sonny to his post in the midnight sun with a cooler of jelly, haters will call it preserves and some
strippers though there is no arousal on the job there is no good and evil you
call Maafa a traitor she’ll giggle with a straight face she’s got no care for loyalty to today she
carries the cooler on stage her coy grease the pages and Macon Georgia isn’t even ready for
these riots East St. Louis isn’t even a bribe away from hellfire swaying in the cotton corner
of how we kick our habits
I guess I’m reluctant to write this shit
The one about the white hitman who coaxed me into his bed with some liberation fantasy
Papers I couldn’t read or wouldn’t and left me for dead when it got too good
They took him to the madhouse to treat his fever Took me for a barn owl
And caught our offspring on a raggedy stack beside articulate livestock By Black Spring
We had Lena Horne and I was nearly a doctor to keep telling inklings and kindling
Crazy little me beautiful me exuberant about my grief healing everybody but daylight
The three serpents writhing in my belly will have to be enough. This brisk risenness of oranges whatever riddles
left swarming in the milk of lady bulls give themselves up as venom does and the buzz of dusk on
the first day of summer was the muttering otherness of dust on the last dapper pink and rattlers in pale masks
like scales. The self is the least of it. Of such eloquent murder Ella of the curved notes and dangling
clothespins in the first yard he pushed me in I fell over some wiry American Beauty that leads
with thorns and creases to have crushed me to have shut me into the rage of escaping alive to
have left me lying on my back eyes at the season plotting my alibi of daisies and
praise dance when I stand up wobble into the yellow taxi plant a shadow where you
used to be and fill it with daddies exactly like you
Sunrays get dangerous as happiness I heard you were plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty (laughs) I
have enough copper in my veins to free all the slave ghosts trapped in your drole Madonna and nobody
knows you when you’re blowing up statues unless you get inside singing Bohemian Rhapsody off Hoover
I’m tempted to love the monuments this year as if it could mean something as if that love comes
with a roadhouse in some Jersey suburb and all the candied apples but no broken teeth I’m tempted to be
lenient, lean in wearing slacks and Ray Bans whispering I can paint the sky black
I can paint the sky black