Arts
What’s African American about African American poetry? Fragments/(pieces of myth in the science, or is it pieces of time in the silence or is it The Loud Minority, deluxeremix edition, directed by Spike Lee, and starring Spike Lee and me (gotta have it) to get it), filmed from above with a free floating dolly so we look like we’re flying and falling at the same All/ways: an omni-directional demonstration of what it is and what it is, like when a question makes you so numb to answer you become its slant, To the Race Industry in crisis: obvious as an ear, though you are close to my heart, but you, Black and Beautiful Industry, it’s you I love! And poets won't save you. Pimps have a better chance, a chant that sounds so African it bends the shape of Louisiana into Yoruba, until the quiet comes. And into the quiet come some shy verses about inside feelings that earn you a whiskey and a seat at the piano. Julliard, grandscheme. You send a letter home to your parent(s): They won't exploit me I promise. I speak like a child learning to make the sound Ireverberate, go wild, go will, go subconscious, go Freud, go James Baldwin. Speak like a chill running up and down your spine when the singer’s voice cracks into lilt/falsetto/glow for short, an unlimited crevice/menace/mercy of double consciousness until you forget that you are the singer, that’s you up there singing, at least that’s your body, some kind of Coptic replica or whatever. Up where? Speak and you shall find— (The Tower of) Babel is to Babylon as the Cabin is to Uncle Tom. He's in there, speaking in tongues like these, plus sun, like he saw his mom being at the Pentecost each (and every) Sunday. And they say melanin is chaos. I heard it on the radio. I am the radio. I heard myself say it. I said on the FisherPrice boombox during a boomtime for doomsayers, shepherd-like, a little higher-priced at a high-class auction. White-collar price. This goes out to chaos. Hydrogen bomb. Atomic bomb. If they push that button... All I know is the girls were calm as smithereens, conned, dreaming backwards. I don't mean to be vulgar. It just so happens. I was weeping and then I saw a neon jesus (on my mind) and almost laughed, but it wasn't funny, it was like… math from the sunlord bleeding through the number runner's pretend storefront. Someday My Prince Will Come. (It was) Like a promise, like a sacrifice, solstice sliced into death and rebirth and best things, like the bull or the cow running into the proud fire, but it was Michael Jackson. Saint saint sinner saint, so sin/serious, hero, ya heard, scum, paint, to sniff, to smear, to pollock, to politik, to picture it from hearing it. It's painful to know him so clear (ly). He into whom everybody's Orpheus poem sinks as the Nile on Nihilism or designer drug window huddle, and blackface, afro to match, and as if to say... yo momma’s so black the only english she speaks is the singing, and the only singing she knows is the blues. Your hero’s so black you can’t see him no more. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah. That's not a dis, though, that's a compliment. And where does the slang discome from— what’s some etymology, distance, comfort, or distortion by closeness. A musician on tour washing dishes at the club between gigs. Langston Hughes in Paris washing dishes at the gig between clubs. Love oh, love oh, careless love. That's Bessie Smith, almost at the hospital when the blood strokes midnight. We choose life! Dammit. Eternal life. Atum Ra, Ptah, Ma-At, Osiris, thief who stole my sad days, us-and-them usher-inners, how many of us black gods do you want. Stealing is not like earning but it blends in with want like a turn in the phrase please don't go, I wah-nt you to stay the sad banner preys (and prays and praise and preys again) right in front of the abandoned schoolhouse turned bootleg abortion clinic turned whorsehouse turned house of the rising sun, turnt out, turnt up, bout it! Where Sun Ra is to Miles Davis as...