Category: Afroticity

Black is color of my life. Black are my lover’s eyes. Black her swaddling clothes. She races life in black stilettos, my, my, my. Black is life before creation. Black is life after the apocalypse. Black crepe paper is the night sky with junkie tracks we call stars. Black like me. Yes. Yes. Black is the color of my heart. Black are my tears. Black is my blood, It vanishes into the black earth. The pits of hell are black. My deeds are black. My future is black. My children are black. The stories I read them have black morals. My children will come to a black end. They are young, gifted and too black. Shoe shine black. Boot black. Tar baby black. Black gold. Black is beautiful. Black is where it’s at. Jazz is black. Didn’t you know. Blues is black. Black is blues. Just a variation. But it’s black. I read black. I buy black. I f**k black. God is Black. You didn’t know that either. Black is the road. Black is the fast car shuffling us to the brink of humiliation. It’s a black thing. That’s a black joke. Black is the long days journey perforated by an occasional riot we call color. Black is what we close our eyes to. Remember that. Black is what we close our eyes to. And still we rise because what else are we to do. We are Black.

I’d like to eat some eyes
scalp a head or two
napalm New York L.A. or Kankakee.
When my guts are brick I’d like to throw them
at the window pane of America
because I’ve been sucked inside out and I’m delicate
about fences housing projects barbed wire
welfare gross national products unemployment and my crotch.
Sensitized inside out to the color of Elsie’s pure products
I’d like to put hand grenades in milk bottles
so corn flakes would rip their heads off.
I’d like to defoliate central park so it would look like home.
I’d like to deflower new jersey (though it’s been done)
I’d like to denounce kansas
make window bricks from red neck georgia clay.
I’d like to suck on root quiet
settle the dust
sleep and not get up until soft was waiting for me.
I’d like to move and move and move like a dancer
out of Harlem out of Watts out of the south side
from uptown to down or the other way around
from Appalachia Soweto Dachau Main Street.
I want to get out of the hills
out of the towns
not be the buzz in somebody’s ear.
I want to be yes when my little girl wants
all fingertips on skin
honey and bees in a beech tree
a coral burst that puzzle blends part of a spectrum
electric then magnetic
a wave that crests and crashes on the beaches of america
and sucks the sand down deep.
I want to be a face not pointed at with baseballs.
No more grease paint, wet canvas
or peanut eating crowds that leave after the elephants roll over.
Spin a web so I cannot see the sun
but I will not lie down waiting to be stung.
I don’t want to be less than a butterfly.
Let me sing braids and ribbons without ropes and burning nights
and the smell of flesh curling up to heaven
as tears fall down like wheat before a sickle.
Give me an icarian chance and I will melt or fly over a mirrored humanity.