A Silent Bomb

The horizon conquers the sun with mountains,
exploding it into pieces of rainbow,
as though a bomb went off in silence.

A man who has made a fortune in the oil business
looks out across a city from his high-rise window,
watching the horizon conquer the sun in the distance

The city exhales and pollution mixes
with the sunset, scattering new colors throughout
the sky like a bomb went off in silence.

This great American city stands in allegiance
to the Bush presidency and rich CEO’s.
Its monuments of capitalism conquer the sun.

Halfway around the world, the sky lacks such vibrance.
Burning oil wells and cities fill the air thick with smoke:
This bomb did not go off in silence.

Over the horizon comes a flock of jets;
people search for shelter in the ruins of their homes.
America conquers Iraq for a president,
and another bomb goes off with violence.

Atheist Dark

Your cancer blossoms like the mushroom cloud
of an atomic bomb that detonates
inside you, blaring like faith that drowns.
A cell door shuts as it incarcerates

us inside this nightmare. Anti-theism
awakens and without removing nails,
I rip Christ from his throne the way chicken
flesh tears off the bone. How can he fail

to protect you from disease and expect
to still receive unconditional love
from us like religious oblivious
slaves? We open our eyes and watch the dove

ascend, fracture scriptures strangling our hearts,
hands clasped, cancer dies in this atheist dark.

Blacked Out Too Soon

Nat Turner, Medgar Evers,
Mark Clark, Bunchy Carter.
Kurt Cobain, John Brown.
Tony C., Dedan Kimathi,
Dalal Mughrabi,
Waruhiu Itote.
Reggie Lewis, Patrice
Lumumba.
Ché Guevára, Ayyat
al-Akhras, Butch Bosket,
Wafa Idris, Len Bias. Seamus
Costello, Augusto
César Sandino.
James Connolly,
Bob Marley, Li’l Bobby
Hutton. Michael Collins,
Robert Johnson,
George Jackson, Fred Hampton,
Frantz Fanon, Bobby Sands.
Crazy Horse.
Martin Luther
King,
Tupac Amaru
Shakur. Malcolm
X.

Blood/Lines

But you’re gonna need a bulletproof soul…
First time in Leniece’s room, I ask who’s
singing on her stereo. She shows me
an Ebony, Sade on the cover.
How old do you think she is? It’s the first
time I’ve heard of her. Um, twenty-seven?
She’s forty-two. Wow, she’s still pretty hot.

Black girls are way prettier than white girls,
I tell her. Are you serious? Kind of
laughing as she says this, she looks at me
like I’m joking. Well, what does your dad say?
He doesn’t care, makes no difference to him.
Leniece nods and seems impressed with my dad.

She asks my ethnicity and I say
Irish. I ask her if she knows the source
from which her bloodline flows. She shakes her head.
A lonely searchlight emanating from
her eyes projects a sad but familiar
frustration. I can trace my family back
only as far as South Carolina.

We sit side-by-side on her bed looking
at photos of her life, but she wants me
to see the people in the pictures, not just
see photos as photos: her parents
and sister, lots of relatives and friends.

Stories and names seep into perception—
they are no longer just parts of pictures
as they were but a few minutes ago.

Leniece points out a boy, tells me that he
was her first love. Postscript: Went to college,
met some other girl.

She muffles the nagging sun with the shade,
alarm set to late afternoon. I am
about to go when she drops a pillow
beside her bed, like a declaration
of faith or comfort in a new friendship.

Sade sings softly as I fall asleep.
Is it a crime? I always notice when
this song’s on. The pain and power of her voice
spin the volume dial from the inside.

Clarity on the Rocks

Silence
all of the clever metaphors
that equate shit like scrambled porn
to battle in war. Yes,
I can squeeze vibrant juice jammed
with vitamins from the driest
pits of peaches eaten long ago.
Just because it’s beautiful
does not make it significant.
Dry peach pits kneaded
into verse are only nice.
But I’d rather make juice
that’s acidic, sweet, and bitter
at the same time, rich with
transcendent nutrients that rush
the brain and heart like heroin.
My mix will make you think
that you’ve got daggers slashing
the inside of your stomach,
each incision sipping acid.
This all-natural cocktail will make you
strong, though it feels like it’s got
a round-trip ticket when you drink it.
But it’s too sticky and heavy to puke,
so the shit you’re spraying is thin,
watery poison, expunged from your body
making room for clarity.
I’ve got some parched shit way deeper
than peaches to juice. Wait until you try
the drink I wring from crack rock,
as I transform its crackles and pops
into splashes and drops.
And don’t take that prose about
dried-out leaves too seriously,
‘cause I’ve got urgent verses about
dried-out pussy
getting ripped and raped,
and about dry eyes and cheeks
in the face of rape,
the crack plague, the self-hate
that instigates the Black-on-Black Plague.
Please, y’all got to drink this before it’s too late.

Dead Crops

I. So Punk Rock

I’m gonna cut all my hair off, Leniece says,
strolling alongside me from Simpson dining hall
across asphalt, grass, and cement.
It’s a grey October afternoon,
between t-shirt and sweatshirt weather.
Why? I ask, not understanding her issue with
shoulder-length twisted locks. I’ve been getting
perms my whole life, she says. Really? I say,
because my mom’s had some perms to make her hair curl.
I don’t have straight hair, she says as she looks at me
like I should have known. It’s naturally nappy.
I don’t quite get the significance, but
punk rock taught me non-conformity so I say,
Sweet. She smiles and rolls her eyes as she usually
does when I use words like sweet and sketchy.
I guess she senses my search for something
monumental in a drastic haircut.
We enter her room and she casts down her backpack.
She starts clicking and typing at her computer.
You have to see this.

II. How to Make a Slave

By Willie Lynch. Take these differences
and make them bigger…use the dark skin slaves
versus the light skin slaves, young versus old,
male versus female…distrust is stronger than trust,
envy is stronger than respect…distrust all Blacks.
self re-fueling and self-generating
for hundreds of years…and possibly forever.
Pages scattered with old ads for bleaching
creams, hair straighteners. You can pass for white!
Makes black skin perfectly white! Guaranteed!

III. Warrior

Let’s go find some clippers
permed hair lies on square tiles
dead crops across fields

Dramatic Monologue

for Amadou Diallo and Abner Louiama

Finally, redemption, in this moment.
Our power so present—night admits we own it.
The spotlight shines down from the helicopter
on our last stand to stop them from killing cops here.
This homeboy questioned us, we all got pissed:
Just let us search you and best you not resist!
But his big lips kept spewing disrespect;
this uppity darkie could not accept
that we run these streets, that we own his block.
I’ve had enough of this shit, I reach for my glock—
This boy’s lucky the precinct counts bullets
or we’d be using clips instead of clubs and kicks.
He’s cursing whenever there’s not a boot
in his mouth. We’re told words we should not use,
told to leave them sunken beneath our tongues, submerged
in the melting First Amendment, but they converge
tonight with hot righteous spit and spray his proud face
with disgrace: Coon! Monkey! Animal race!
He tries to rise to (all four of) his feet;
there’s no escape surrounded by an eight cop wreath.
We give him a few limps like we’re letting him free,
then club his back with swings like Jason Giambi.
Homeruns crumple him and his hope like the Red Sox.
Now he begs through bubbles of blood that stretch and pop
at his nose and mouth, Please! Stop Officers!
And suddenly, we’re this humble sambo’s masters.
Too late to play house nigger, tar-black boy,
You kept running your mouth, nigger, scarred-back boy.
Gun in hand, I bend to the new topography
of his face, his faint voice struggles to cop a plea.
My eyes meet his one barely open eye
that betrays his begging, glaring hate and pride,
telling me to go fuck myself, just like
all their eyes did as I failed to save a cop’s life
whose body had become a sieve draining blood
and bullets sent by a self-defense claiming Blood.
I follow the path set by my great president—
Bomb first, this is pre-emptive self-defense.
Torso twisted, arm extended, release
the tension. The rancid air of these streets
parts for my pistol-whip as it lashes
his eye shut. Now his face calls me massa.
His limp body blows in our violent rain,
warped and swollen like strange fruit in a hurricane.
Tonight is about the All-American Way,
freedom to speak without heed to what censors say,
our freedom to police without worry
of being called racist stopping blacks in Marcy.
We are soldiers behind enemy lines
without camouflage, targets for enemy nines,
fighting back against some semi-American
with a semi-automatic volunteering
to spray subways for money that he could make
at the job he could have but won’t take.
Blood on pavement is payback for wages
snatched from white hands maintaining white babies
to pay for welfare queens in Cadillacs,
black market gats for gangsters slanging crack.
Breaking ribs build our own reparations
for razors and rapes emancipation
has birthed in alleys, around dark corners,
for politically-correct endorsing
of integrating big black dicks with our daughters.
Bend him over; I’ve got a big black stick.
Strip his ass; I’m gonna make him my bitch.
I muscle the club in and up until
he screams like a horror flick slut getting killed.
Let’s lock him up, shackled, stripped, and sodomized.
This is the Middle Passage, N.Y.P.D. style.

Disarmed and Impassioned

The blues draw me in like lips
on the sad girl, the crimson grips
my eyes like her nails do my back
and I am captured.

Repetitive scrape-smack
of knife on palette
lasts ‘til forearm and wrist
ache, searching for that rich
and bright black of eyes that
disarm and impassion. Mixed
colors writhe, luminous and wet,
awaiting their trip with the brush
to be swirled and smeared,
stroked and smacked across
just primed and sanded canvas
until they blend like sunsets
or fire, until they twist
around each other like fingers
interlocked.

Manifest abstracts
into concrete,
sadness sinks into passion
explodes colors more vibrant
than love, something new, a hue
just short of salvation:
Some color never seen,
only felt or imagined.
A color composed under
the notion that sunlight
only hides
the moon and starry sky.

Field Trip to a Museum in Spanish Harlem

Spring morning's sun burns heavy through the bus window
as I squint to see the skyline obscured
by dizzying punches of sun and eyelashes,
but I cannot decipher any steel-
boned, glass-hide towers that define this city’s
imperial palace in photographs and films.
Reflections and rays are scrambled like pay channels.
From the back of the bus, a classmate
raps along to a song on his headphones,
Broken glass everywhere. The Message reaches us,
on our way to the Schomburg. Another
joint Diddy jacked. Public housing projects
stand like dying gardens stretching out
from both sides of the highway.
Yankee Stadium blooms, and we target
it with middle fingers.

We are riding over the streets of Harlem;
We cannot spot a single white face and are bound
to the bus windows, fogged by laughter and chatter,
but our fingers wipe, leaving behind dirty words.
A teenager runs on the sidewalk with speed
reserved for being late or running away
when Brian announces, Look at this guy!
 I think he's running from the cops!
 Everyone from one side dives across the aisle
to get a view, and we are all laughing.
Teary-eyed, I can barely stop to take a breath
because laughter propagates laughter.
I'm watching through lines cleared of fog to form
the letters of Harlem World. I notice a dog
and this sight is a still-red coal that falls
into my gasoline soul. Every laugh
inside me is instantly incinerated
when I see that boy running like a runaway
trying to beat his own scent, like Kunta
before they axed his foot, like this boy’s own
enslaved ancestors, speed fueled by the fusion
of terror and confusion, the hope for
someplace better than here. That bloodline
is still running, but the North Star faded
once it reached New York. So now this manchild
probably runs in circles like Claude Brown
incarcerated in the Promised Land.
I realize that the air in here is going stale,
and I feel nauseous whenever someone
speaks or at the slightest physical convergence.
Here in the back of the bus, it's the same old shit.

Four hours away from our small Massachusetts town,
we get off the bus and walk into the Schomburg.
Shadows dominate. Inside light
is as bold as blood on snow.

Heart of New England

If the cold rain falls hard enough, it muffles
the murmur of the dying life-support
machine, attached to an old woman
in Worcester. IVs descend beneath
her skin, raping veins with complacency.
Only then is she able to ingest
life in a place where the skyline never
shines, but becomes bleached in the sun, and brick
turns the color of a bloodstain after
many futile attempts to wash it off.

When she was young, her parents enlisted
Worcester’s best surgeons to saw through her skull
and remove thoughts of leaving from her mind.
Now she lies dreamless in a hospital bed.
A television is bolted to the wall,
eternally tuned to public access,
calling Worcester the “heart of New England,”
as though New England has a cancerous
tumor on its heart. She awakes screaming

the name of the love of her life, a boy
who escaped to California, sick
of Worcester, of charading, of waiting
for her. Tomorrow the Telegram runs
her obituary, her life’s last word.
It reads: Lifelong resident of Worcester.

Katrina Katrina Katrina

Katrina Katrina Katrina.
The government knew you
were riding in on the water
like Christ obsessed with destruction,
possessed by self-proclaimed Christians
trumpeting state-supported executions.
But the state sent no support, just let nature
take its course, perform the execution.
No charge or charges involved.
Well, there’s one problem solved.

Mo(u)rning

My pen’s almost dry, the sun’s almost up,
but here I’m up again all night searching.
Searching for
inspiration, motivation, what’s the
reason?, an AK-47.
My surface might look placid, but you can’t
grasp what goes on in the deep.
My mind is too rapid to sleep,
and my mind is too rabid to speak.
So this line amasses scratches and streaks,
as though my blood grew feet, clawed out of me,
and danced a twenty-six step dressed in Black.
This is my Red Cross, but this is not my Cross.
Paper tigers kill nothing but time and
paper martyrs bleed nothing but rhyme…
Words gain their worth when they make someone hurt.
Words become real when they make someone heal.
Nothing will grow when blood rains on barren land,
but I make flowers grow from weary hands.
Poetry gives hope to throats choked with Iraqi sand;
I swear it can.
‘Cause it douses serenity across
the grumbling in my stomach, or rather,
the screams in my soul--for a minute
at least--once they’ve had their stories told.
Because it’s hard to rest in peace when you die
in the cargo hold; and it’s hard to rest
in peace when you saw your own daughter sold.
How much pain can one heart hold?
And don’t forget those who can only rest
in peace when they’re resting with a piece.
I have been branded from inside by
stolen land and genocide, lungs scraped raw
by clawing, frantic hands of a woman
pregnant with fair-skinned child. Banging
on my voicebox, her screams
spider-web through my bones
from sternum to fingertips.
It’s morning and the birds are chirping,
but in my mourning, my concern is if
this verse is working, if the words are burning
(Babylon down).
Words converge with nerves like sparks
from the brain, coursing currents toward change,
The earth has spun back to day.

Night Owl

He looks like a mother deer in a field
while her fawns feed, watching for predators.
Eyes dart, head continuously turning
from right to left and left to right
like a swing set sideways. He would spin it
one hundred eighty degrees like an owl
if he could. Paranoia has become
a necessary color on the palette
of his person.

He stands against an old dying building
named after some ex-governor
who determined it be erected as
a part of some grand public housing scheme.
Years later, it appears to have been part
of some grand public housing scam. A garden
of high-rises planted and packed, but never
watered with anything but
rancid and crack.

Just out of the orange-yellow drapery
cast from the streetlight, he shivers even
in his puffy, black down jacket. He pulls
the faux-fur-lined hood up over his head
trying to keep warm while he waits.
Heater in his waist just makes him colder,
Tims work to keep blood in freezing toes,
pocketed hands fiddle with pre-paid cell.

Finally, a fiend, looking for a fix.
During the exchange, he asserts himself
as calmly as a butcher or bartender
while eyes cast motion-sensitive lasers.
Fix on a figure and he starts reaching
before realizing it’s but a homeless
man shuffling from one place to another,
taking his suffering from one place to another.

November

The leaves slowly die their vibrant deaths.
The sun grows distant, I become colder.
From above, red leaves fall peacefully to the grass.
As each leaf dies, it breathes life into winter.

The sun can barely warm me anymore,
although summer seems so recent.
Each dying leaf’s last breath is winter,
soon the cold will strip the trees of life.

Summer seems so recent. I can still feel
the hot sun drying the Atlantic off my body.
Soon the trees will be stripped of life.
The waves against the shore cease to sound like summer.

I stand far from the surf and keep the cold Atlantic off my body,
I wish for last summer and you as I drown
in memories. The waves crash against winter.
The tide’s roar slowly deafens our summer.

Time pulls me from you and last summer. I am drowning
in Fall and soon I’ll forget the way August felt,
the falling leaves deafening the sounds of our summer.
It’s like November is the only month I’ve ever known.

I’m falling, and soon I’ll forget the way you felt,
And if I’m lucky, I’ll forget all about you.
Is alone is the only thing I’ve ever been?
I hope the snow is so distractingly beautiful

that I get lucky and forget all about you.
Above me, the sky collapses and paints everything white.
I hope the beauty of the snow distracts me enough
to make me forget the vibrant leaves before they died.

The Only Heat Barbie Ever Held Was a Hair-Dryer

Surgical mask and skull cap are the doctor’s
bandana and hood as he grips the scalpel
in his latex fingerprint-less fist.
He slashes through the baby girl’s
umbilical cord, then punctures newborn
skin with an I.V.’s cold, sterile needle,
hooked to a bag marked Female, filled
with liquid submission and liquid
definition.

The boys move mountains of dirt with toy trucks,
build cities and castles with blocks
while she throws tea parties with Barbies.
She watches a boy play with a lone G.I. Joe
and its gun, fighting and conquering
the world on his own. But she is bored
with her one Barbie. She needs:
an assortment of outfits,
a pink convertible,
an array of friends, and
most importantly, Ken.

She grows up strangled in the internet,
taking cues from teenage millionaires’
homemade sex-tapes. She knows nothing about
the male gaze, except that she wants it to fall
upon her like rain during a drought,
so she starts shaving her body before
it even has any hair. Sadistic
sexist society yanks young girl’s teeth
before she ever learns how to bite,
saws off her fingers so they will never
pull the trigger of a sawed-off.
The only heat Barbie ever held
was a hair-dryer.

She just grew breasts, now she’s got to learn how
to flaunt them. She just grew breasts, now she’s got
to learn what’s wrong with them. Twelve years-old
and already trapped in the beast, inmate
number tattooed in lower back.
Property of the state,
mugshots the child-porn-looking photos on Myspace.
Capitalism is the prison
and there’s no need for bars, except the ones
she’ll end up dancing on.

She’s a neo-feminist, going with
“the guys” to strip clubs, but each time a guy
slips a dollar in some sequined g-string,
she can only give seventy-five cents.

She’s told confidence comes from the surgeon’s
scalpel. Relinquish her body, herself.
Severing nerves that will never become
electric with pleasure, reductively
sculpted into a moving mannequin,
her whole life ghost-written by the system.

The Passion of Andy Raya

The desert dried his eyes until they ceased
to gleam and cracked like paintings in the sun.
Andy Raya returned to Ceres
and his youth a nineteen-year-old war vet,
little-kid fear behind middle-finger eyes.

In a restaurant parking lot he rolled
and scrambled over seats in the family car
to get his gun before they shut the doors.
In a letter to his cousin he lamented,
I could’ve lived happily…

Andy Raya used to confuse grade school
classmates by saying see you next year
when they got out for Christmas vacation.
He used to paint a raw egg on Easter
that he was supposed to hide, though always
intended to break it over some other kid’s
ill-fated head. Andy Raya used to
have never been to Iraq.

The Marines claim Andy Raya never
engaged in combat. Their story is that
he operated in a combat zone,
that he was psychologically sound,
according to his company, never
even down. But
Andy Raya screeched a marker across
cardboard ridges to render a sign that beat
like a heart beneath floorboards. A snapshot
captures him clutching truth of a kid gone
from adolescence to desert trenches,
from concern about a mid-term test to
concern for the bullet that burns through his vest:
OPERATION SEND ME HOME.

The Marines claim Andy Raya never
engaged in combat. Their story is that
he operated in a combat zone,
that he was psychologically sound,
according to his company, never
even down. But
Andy Raya drove supply trucks over
a stretch of highway where convoys became
“suicide trains”.
Hearing was blasted from one of his ears
because a bomb in a dog carcass
blew up under a truck in his train.
He saw it levitate like David Blaine,
tossing its riders, breaking and burning
onto the pavement like a sadistic
little kid killing G.I. Joes, but soldiers
of bone don’t resurrect like plastic
action figures, G.I. Joe or jihadist
Jesus Christ in camo.
American and Iraqi blood looked the same
as they watered and repainted the pavement.

The Marines claim Andy Raya never
engaged in combat. Their story is that
he operated in a combat zone,
that he was psychologically sound,
according to his company, never
even down. But
Andy Raya was shackled to his gun
and the Flag down in the cargo hold
like an African on the Middle-East Passage,
hearts disregarded by heartless men
condemning them to strife, chains, and violence,
forced to toil for oil and work the land
until McDonalds’ and strip malls blossom
from the sand on a desert plantation.

Andy Raya knew he’d dive overboard;
he’d rather die drowning than fight some old men’s war
and die doubting
in the place he claimed, You can’t picture Hell
any worse than,
returning to his mom and dad
charred pieces and teeth inside
a flag-draped coffin.

So one bleary night in January, Andy Raya
went hunting like The Most Dangerous Game,
and stalked with skills that in the Marines he was trained.
But Andy Raya was a soldier, not
a puppet of the state. A soldier in his heart
and his head, a soldier too righteous and smart
to see nothing wrong in killing a “target”:
a young mother buying bread in a market.
No, this government did not deserve quiet--
they were the ones who trained him to serve violence.
While the trauma and the horror of it,
he was just supposed to hide it.
That would be like trying
to keep the sun from rising.

Andy Raya’s only camouflage were shadows
as he watched two officers exit the squad car
and then disappeared around a tire store.
Police boots clunked and spat as they stepped in the rain,
sounds Andy Raya used to measure the approaching game.
Invisible to his prey until two flashes and bangs
birthed from the barrel of his SKS semi-automatic.
Moving and shooting in tactics
so practiced that they’d become automatic.
His mind flashed back to shit he would never forget:
Innocent dead, bodies missing heads, arms, and legs.
Peering through gun smoke, he vowed not to miss
heads, arms, and legs.
One cop’s guts were ripped to ruins like bombed-out
Baghdad buildings, while another’s body
had been made a drain like the pigs did Diallo
or non-English-speaking Iraqis at roadblocks.

Andy Raya dove into a suburban sea
of backyards, drifting in grass for two hours.
He assured residents that toward them
he had no ill intent. He’d never harm civilians.
Andy Raya was the honorable soldier
the Army claims to create: one who knew
that “free” meant “free”, and that ash- and blood-
covered little boys crying at their mothers’ feet--
and only their feet--are not “collateral damage”.

As he hopped fences, his poncho would rise
up behind him like wings. As he floated
through the night, Andy Raya looked like
an angel on a mission, or
a study in contradiction:
A heavenly being packing a gun.
Block surrounded by a county’s supply of swine,
Andy Raya hid from helicopter lights in trees’ shade,
where he listened to the choppers and megaphones
speak to him like the scream of the Reaper.

He stripped himself of threads and arms and scaled
and descended a fence in one (trained) graceful motion,
landing with hands up, immersed in searchlight
like a spotlight that made the alley a stage,
for the performance of a real-life Passion play.
Guns were extensions of their hard-ons for revenge,
and upon seeing Andy Raya, every officer
stationed in that alley began blowing his load,
and made Andy Raya’s body dance
like a puppet strung to a speed-freak Gepetto.
Arms outstretched, Andy Raya died
for the sins of his country.

The hunters approached their kill and were denied
the pleasure of believing their big guns
had bled the angel’s last moments with fear and regret,
for Andy Raya was defiant even in death.
Stretched from shoulder-to-shoulder across
the light-coffee back of Andy Raya was inked,
Solo dios me puede juzgar.

Shakira

Deep mahogany
Penetrating, engulfing
At the same time. Eyes.

Hips epitomize
Divine sexuality
Swaying abstract art

Hips hypnotize heart
Eloquence exceeds the tongue
Paint truth in the air

Tiny body brings
World to peace or to madness
Colombian girl

Sing to the Tune of a Gun Being Loaded

smug smiles on display, politicians shaking
hands, fucking each other. fucking
the people with capitalist dicks
ejaculate oil into puppet soldiers’
corpses in the name of big business
endorsements. of course this war is
never the source of hate for our nation’s
fate is to take and to rape
natives and slaves, anyone
who does not want to be saved
by a white christian god,
his psychotic profits, plugging bullshit
amendments to apprehend human rights,
to apprehend movements and fights
are silenced like forty-one shots that night
in the Bronx addict babies cried for rocks
are met with bullets of fundamentalist
goverments with zionist aspirations
toward extermination of the Palestinian nation.
and you ask why I’d bomb police stations!
let’s take guns, pistol whip
pigs until they all sing
the song of a throat choked with blood.
can you say nigger with this heat between
your teeth? you terrorize the streets, sodomize
men and call it interrogation.
my head’s plagued with questions bleeding
tears from my eyes will never close
because I’ll never know.

Soul Source

Warm apple aromas soften the touch
of the new season’s breeze like a refreshing
massage sculpted from wind’s eye-drying lashes.
Autumn leaves float by atop the surface
of the river; waters from the Mississippi
to the Carribbean, the Atlantic
to the Amazon, from the Rio Grande
to the streets and alleys of New Orleans
sink into each other and encircle
American history, its sole source
veins and lungs of the abandonded.
Hundreds of years rising with Red, Brown, Black
bodies like last Fall’s fallen foliage—
pimped when in season, soon after
suffocated under the snow—
this month it has begun to overflow
like a toilet in a mansion, fucking
up our morning coffees and newspapers
that reassure us that the blood is dammed
in the Middle East and inner city streets.
America bites into apple pie
and water-soaked flesh squishes and squirts in its teeth.

The Sword and the Stone

The mine swallows my stomach’s growls
like a drowning man’s scream.
Broken fingernails trap dirt beneath.
They call this mining, but
none of it’s mine. All the while,
making it possible for men to ask,
Will you be mine?
Over five-star wine and dine.
If I whine, I die.
There are no Valentines.
Here we die for diamonds
so that men can vie for diamonds
and have women lie for diamonds.
Each one I find brings only brief
relief, as fading as a single sparkle
on a stone, ‘cause
Daddy’s dead and Mommy’s dying
and here I am mining.
They tell me to find shining diamonds.
I’m trying,
but I can’t help hear my sister crying.
Now she’s only got one hand
‘cause she got caught lying
down on the job when it got too tiring.
That’s all I know of diamond cuts--
now a little girl’s arm ends in a stub.
Exit at dusk like a soldier
trudging out after surviving a battle.
The sun is a burning cherry spraying
its red juices across the sky.
I’ve seen machetes spraying
bodies’ red juices across the mine.
There’s a Western fairytale called
The Sword in the Stone.
This is the real life tale of the Sword
and the Stone.

Waves in the Dark

Somewhere behind us on this boardwalk, screams
of people riding rollercoasters play
like a looping background track to summer
night. I hold you against me in an embrace
scented by fruit shampoo and Atlantic
air, watching sand, sea, and sky contradict
each other, infallibly harmonious.

Each wave takes its turn reflecting the moon,
it shimmers orange, briefly replacing
vacant black before crashing and breaking
against the sleeping shore. We drop
whispers dressed with always and I promise,
using forever as if we believe
there’s nothing past the stars we can see.

Yet soon ferris wheels and rollercoasters
hibernate as cities swallow summer,
and naked trees reach for sun like starving
hands grasping at food.
Motel signs all concede vacancy.
A plastic palm falls from a fake palm tree,
fractured by the weight of wet coastal snow.
This new year
attacks us until we are waves in the dark,
exploding against February shores.

When the Player Piano Dies

White guys don’t even look at me, she says.
We sit on the big concrete piece of modern art
at Redstone campus, a frozen sheet blowing in
the wind. I do not notice much, only green grass
and blue sky. People walk past. Leniece is
from the Bronx, Christopher Columbus High, all Black
and Latin kids. Her eyes hold mine. She says,
I’ve had a lot of hate in me for all the things
whites have done. I ask, Well what do you think of me?
Our friendship founded on scorn for class assignments,
conversations on papers that stretched to senseless,
until a lunch two weeks ago when she
said, You’ve never had a black olive?
Eat this! So I did.
She smiles at me. You seem like a very
nice person. Then I smile and say, Thanks.
The students and sun and buildings outside
this stone magic carpet are a cliché.

Your Fatigues

I wished again today for seventh grade,
when backyard woods were battlefields for games
of war, and we’d throw baseballs like grenades.
Never falling bombs, only falling rain.

Seventh grade ran out and my most recent
photo of you shows you squinting under
desert sun, gun in your hand demands respect.
How many times has that gun helped plunder

villages and helped the innocent die?
You said you wanted to fight oppression,
but now you help to invade and colonize
a nation in the name of America.

When you come home will you wear new beliefs
in the oil and blood staining your fatigues?

What Good Is an Angel in Heaven?

What good is an angel in heaven,
where the people are already saved,
while mothers here must pick out coffins
for sons who packed guns and didn’t give a fuck?
Why are the angels all in heaven?

Maybe because they can’t help feeling
the pain of the poor on hot summer nights,
sweating in tenements, heads hurting
from hunger and anger. Angels cannot
fall asleep to the news.

For many, angels’ words are the only
remedies for hopelessness that does not
end in crack babies, cracked bodies, and cracked hearts.
We demand salvation, but who will save
the angel yelling out, I’m hopeless!?

Angels know not old or peaceful death
or even rest. It would be futile
to try to rest from feeling. Neither weed,
liquor, nor women can dampen
that consuming and sometimes-crippling love.

Angels die young and angels die hard,
knowing and defiant. A stoplight
in Vegas, a balcony in Memphis,
always with violence. We hear bullets
explode from barrels on missions to destroy
revolution and hope and compassion,
the sound of skin tearing, of ribs breaking,
of lungs busting--lungs that breathed pollution
so that others wouldn’t have to. Then silence

screams, from ballrooms in Harlem to jungles
in Bolivia. When an angel dies,
we do not mourn in quiet, but in riot,
showing pigs that in us his soul still lives.
The streets explode like a bomb was behind
the martyr’s bullet wounds. Flames shimmer
in tears, sweat, and broken glass.

But police reply with an attack,
shoot some Black boy in the back,
blood weaves through asphault cracks,
spells out, “Come back.”