Three Odes and Selected Poems of a

Settian Man

David E. Patton

1
The mocking bird is continuous and poets are no difference but instead of harassing
cardinals, robin, starlings and black birds we harassed the government and the ruling
church. Sometime we must cease our return fire and give in to beauty we must lay down
our pens put away our keyboards and take notes of the homeless cat that huddle under a
tipped over waving pool and smell the perfumed air and the blushing moon when in each
city and town the Wild Irish Rose night with its rosy cheeks and dark eyes to see what
perish with the moon. Poets are our savors our saints in living clothes
Honey mouth and full of uncontrolled enthusiasm the muddy, the stale pone of our
forgivefullness that we may see ourselves ripple with delight and desires fulfilled, it is the
poet who will plea our case before the Gods poets in faded jeans and their ways of amiable
monks out on an occasion for to save our souls. They are desperate for us they are beer gut
just like us and grizzled beard tossing haikus off the work of the poet because they are
masquerades of who we are this hour the poet looks behind our masks and see what is
hidden as the real self that we keep in our secret faces and only they can and Gods willing
fashion with words who we wish to be, they tell us about all our faults and friends us with
the wooing of words the cut of night into small bite size pieces and find friendship in the
individuality of trees and mocking birds on the wing and they ask us to follow them into
our dreams where is seen all matter of being human the girlish boy, the mannish woman the
teething baby as cosmos incarnate. When the Gods laid out the framework of poets
They made us contrary to the call like poets guardian poets are rebellious heroes and
sometime lost souls lingering in the dark forest where we plant our wants and wishes for
world peace a forgotten thing to dream. Life is crowed and tight breath it’s a come around
for us for a space of time that only nature can design. I was brought into the fold in 1953
half way between the birth and the death of a century. I am old schooled bold and black my
red back throwing frizzled moods with my boss in Denver I am old schooled of poetic rules
on how to be human mid century a child of the seventies I came to age and learned my
ways of who to befriend and win their confident as a friend mate when the poet is returning
fire for some offence made against man it is they who come to defend to win back our
glory to appease the Gods and angels that sits bear bottom on the low hanging branches and
piss down on the passer byer who takes it as drops of rain yes Gods and angels are insanely
sane when it comes to man. Love is the bitch that pissed on me when I was a younger tree
and poets are nothing more they are stray dogs in our familiar heaven lost and homeless
dogs who raise their legs to mark their territory
Some dogs are disobedience to our will for they guards the secrets of the Gods and Gods
are coetaneous and bullish as bullies who bullet us. The God of the ant is my God. The
hawk-eyed hawk God is mines God, the starling bathing in the puddle of dead rain from
which it drinks
Is my God, my Gods are many as life I see they woo you and me. They mind their Ps and
Qs and grow like weeds by a governing rule they my brothers called Gods but who hung on
the tree was only a son as you and me and subject to the desires and temptation of the flesh
are we. Some Gods are caution of the scent of man caught on the wind some men hide their
scent from foe and woman seen as so in the know who to have birth their sons some
women folk yoke in a woman to love as one in the know in the life and Settian men.
Women in the know of how the cosmos goes its round as a woman a sun a tree’s strength is

2
in its roundness its womainess Some men are worms laying seed in flowers to get to the
flesh of the fruit these men who wish their babies well and take to the wind is only doing
what other animals do fathers too to do the truth that is always blue and the telling is
always red yellow is the last word you read and green means many things that grow in this
world men are mine to love and foe to plow and grow but never cargo ship their souls or
enslave their desires and sexual hopes for cotton, tobacco, sugar or, rum my grandfather
Charlie Ike cottoned his lungs never smoked or rum his free days and nights a saintly man
till old and gray and I bathe him in the tub his second babyhood had begun. Poets as
mocking birds sing many songs and there-by will we get some wrong but it is our duty to
ask you to sing along what moves the spirit as some gospel song on the tongue. So after the
bars are closed and only infomercials rules the airwaves and the late night talk is about the
morrow the poets will still be awake to see what light steals across the dawn.
David E. Patton St. Louis, Mo .

3
Table of Content

Ode to Aimé Césair ………………………………………………1

Ode to Beauty…………………………………………………....10
Ode to Faderico Garcia Lorca…………………………………...13
Morning News…………………………………………………...17
All I wanted to do…………………………………………….….18
For the Color Folks………………………………………..……..19
Pregnancy is Walking…………………………………………….20
Beneath the Moon…………………………………………......…21
My Sons Needn’t Pay Homage…………………………......……22
I’m a Bad Mother Fucker……………………………………...…23
Sou City……………………………………………………......…24
Miss Lucy, She’s in that Way…………………………………….26
I’ll Cry No More……………………………………………...…..27
I Went to the Pawn Shop………………………………………....28
You Sho Do Treat Me Good Baby……………………..…………29
Old Mrs. Reagan Told Us to Just Say No………………………...30
Anthony Patton-Burton Wolfrang……………………………..….31
I Would Have Love to do Me Dirty……………………………....33
Mellow Bones……………………………………………………..34
If God……………………………………………………………...35
I Hear a Street Blues………………………………………………36
Portrait of God…………………………………………………….37
Poem Written on Two Lines by Countee Cullen…………….……38
Working for the Woman………………………………………..…39
I Like Sounds………………………………………………..……..40
O Holy God My father…………………………………………..…41
A Midsummer’s Night……………………………………..………42
The Expert Witness…………………………………………...……43
Voodoo Wont Work………………………………………………..45
Certain Gestures Holding Pure Forms……………………………..46
A St. Louis Tale……………………………………………………47
The Glen Black………………………………………………….…48
Why I want to have Sex with Poets……………………………..…49
The Short of it…………………………………………………..….51

4
An Atomic Explosion………………………………………………52
I’ve Gotten to the Point in My Life………………………………..…53
Black Attack…………………………………………………………..54
In Such an Age as This………………………………………………..55
En Las Tardes………………………………………………………….56
In the Negro Quarters……………………………………………….…57
For Anne Waldman and Reed Bye…………………………………….58
Angel of My Desiring………………………………………………….59
A Love Poem…………………………………………………………...60
A Brush with Papa Death…………………………………………….…61
Fragment and Reconstruction from the Book of Rys……………..…….62
Friends Are Fattening Themselves……………………………….….….63
The Smell of Death……………………………………………….…..…64
I Went Away From Uijonbu………………………………………….....65
Gertrude Stein N Mind……………………………………………….....66
A Place in Your Heart……………………………………………….…..67
If Ten Thousand People…………………………………………………68
The Promise Land……………………………………………………….69
I Slipped on a Dream………………………………………………..…..70
I Keep Droppin My Gs…………………………………………….….…71
By Deep Design………………………………………………….……...72

5
 Ode to Aimé Césair

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky

with stars in his eyes and the band-aid moon on his cheek.
All the empires are calling; all wish to overcome their defeat at the hand of time. There in
Americus the black men are kept in the closet close to the hangers where a lynched man
swinging in the broken wind is reading the Bible that has forgotten how to save him.

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky

with its pin point light lit by distant fire telling that there is life in the womb of night. In
Americus the children of the Buffalo are crying out but Americus can not hear then there
for she have stuffed her ears with dollar bills that bleed oil across the face of Washington
painted in a school on the San Carlos reservation and the Ute are united with the memory
of Chief Ouray and the Lenid meteor showers streak across the black man’s body bold and
biting at his nipples, bold and bitter by the blood that bleed its beautiful bounty born by the
Buffalo’s brother.

The body of a black man is stretched across the night where crime is committed in the
heated heart heard by the hard hour of a flower smelling of baby’s babble of mama and
dada, papa and the Hungarian’s tata, a tic for a tock runs the baby’s body clock ticking as
darkly of any black man’s skin. The baby will come to call himself nigger in a whisper
barely heard in the smell of cornbread baking in the freezer where we keep out memories
cool, where we want for not the weeping of a good man mending his mind mindfully
mining the Moor’s motion mapped and moped by militants marooned in the bloody battle
buying its time in the told tall tale of tongues.

The body of a black man is stretched across the night that spreads from the heart of trees
dropping their spoils in spoonful to be eaten by the poor with pockets full of the butt ends
of commercialism kept in the warm handout of a caution consumerism recklessly
wounding the poor penny pinchers who pile their mounding of miseries in a make ready
meant to met the mighty monster moaning its mouthful of maturation swollen and
swallowed sour and salty as the tears of a baby Baboon.

The body of a black man is stretched across earth

where the dealers of stars fluff the telling moon with its stolen light listless and capable of a
long lasting loneliness liquid by the last lane leading its facelift given by the 12 hour night
neat and nodding its knowable knowledge nipping at the hind end of a new cold cloudy
caravel wish with its cumbersome cruel chill that cure its stored craven caravan in the
hands and feet of the homeless whose hunger is hurried and hurled from the body into the
trash dumpster where their dinner is to be found, full of the heat that hinge the horror hard
and high on the wounded hurt hidden behind the honesty of the hind legs of a quarrel
quickness of a quirky squirrel quick and quite as the cold is calling the craving cure of a
careful crime committed in the criminal hour of the lady St. Louis stretched along the
Mississippi. The blacks shall come to piss there, will pour out their pities that have piled

6
pound by pound its pulling at the patriarch that preach to St. Louis a lady of common
crimes committed in the common hour. The black man have consummated his union with
the Mississippi, he has bathed there and the sweat washed from his skin and the dirt of
living as one with the land was washed ashore to create the city. The blacks are banished
by being baptized in the Mississippi and the little river of river Des Peres

The body of a black man is stretched across earth spinning without regret its regurgitation
of the umbilical cord of air, weather blown over by outrageous winds weeping the lost
scent of Isis befriending the slaves who picks cotton from her eyes. All matter of mischief
break through when the Gods cry their prayers sobbing like benedictions given in the wee
hour of a satanic challenge, sobbing inconsolable its blazes of flesh, sobbing a millennium
of membranes, sobbing ‘who am I to say” sobbing the tepidity of an indigent delirious lava
that girdle the blue blooded body born by a biting and bitter bully being itself while
drinking from a bottle of blue baby’s tears tossed and tinted to time told tall in the tradition
of trepidation.

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt done over and under where the bodies
of black children killed by their own rattle their bones with an essential concentration that
rush in the Mississippi night hawking its hunger hard and heart felt as horny as flowers are
for bees and man for honey eyed oaks of gone round trees grains ground got to legs of
lamps and canes of old men as wooden in years. The children are killing children, are
killing the killers, and are killing with bloody hand they go looking for the great myth of
their fathers. The children are playing war in the urban brain with its train of tidal waves
rushing pass the vices of their memories dropping like red bricks from an abandoned
building torn open by the weight of black birds.

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt where grows the joyous purple public
in October opting out of the splendor of bread and wine giving only on Sunday in the
church of Yellow Pine weeping their shadows beneath unforeseeable towns abrupt in their
sleep of vague streets lined with shacks restored to their fallen grander, shot gun houses
with Sears catalogue as wall paper. Sugar Ditch Mississippi and Outside of Brooksville
Mississippi, beside the grim of cutwater throated birds the black plow is rusting for want of
use, rusting a dirty red the blood soaked hands of killing the meaty land in an exoticism’s
pulse. The children are killing themselves with the word nigger; slicing open their throats
where fly from them flocks of crows brilliantly bold blue black in their blackness, birds the
bully the bull the butt end of being bold children birth by other children.

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky, it is tied down both hands and feet by
Christianity less he escape into the obsessive rain whose song is the very ecstasy of a
mother God liquefied and dozing its surprises of remembrance of man made treacheries
committed against all but the sun’s force and the cloth that it ware while Willows weep
wantonly white and woozy willing to wrap their warm bragging branches around the
witness that leaving leaves make in the full fall of the atoms of Autumn always over dress
with it dropping of the dressing of all trees and mums low to the girlishness of a grown
season seasoned by the northern wind numbing the knowable night nudging the near-by
near-sighted needs napping in the never-land we know the knee level legalist knowledge of

7
dogs and guinea pigs and grown ground hogs napping in the shadow of a needed night of
sleep. The night creatures fulfill their needs under the flight of night people flying from city
to city they enter the eye of the black man nodding his nap near a dream. The black man’s
body is as bold in his blackness as the tenacity of a milk weed climb on a chain link fence

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky; he is prostrated before the stagnant
breath bitten by baboons and bison, boa constrictors and bobcats listening to the last bobtail
tight and tugged in a tell-tale tongue fit for the language of the young. When Europe have
fallen into white despair that twist its screams as white as virginal milk hatching their
overrated pride then will a brighter day come, an astonishing ambition of accumulated
systematic confessing shadows of an authentic announcing day will come to the brow
beaten land. When the English clothe sleeps in the vomit of the drunken streets full of
exhaled fog falling forward fast and firmly, freely and fondly, fluently as smoke from a
thousand foundries then and then will a brighter day fall full of the mercies showed to the
slaves by Elizabeth dying in her room on morphine, Elizabeth who shall love us best after
death. Why do I love thee, let me pray the way. Elizabeth kind to slaves can not save the
black man born bare by the body of his question that he must ask himself “where forth am I
the child of the feature God of my fortunes fathers founders of my full faith?”

The body of a black man is stretched across the night where negritude falls from his skin to
accused the whites of their aborted sins towering above the jazzy jimson turbulence heard
in the boredom drowning its scandals of offense of skin as sable as Cain’s, living out their
lives in the fundamental hypocrisy of a race done wrong. Do not weep. Be strong in your
Armstrong song. Be hard fisted. Be heard where you have planted your pelvis. Let the
children be full of soulful songs suing the strained long histories of being with the whites
with their wilted promises of 40 acres and a mule. In them the gauntly complicities of
smiles of children; the guilty gusts of children, the empty spaces that they can not keep will
be filled with a horny history hiding its headstrong hornets of honor, its his story holding a
hug that tell of time told by the rime where an empty child is waiting to be filled with the
holy curiosity of broken stones when the mountain convulse and shred the clouds as it rush
to the sea that sucks at the sand to remake the beach in God’s image.
The sun is the secret stolen face of God that secretes its simple song of heat and light
without our buying by a penny. The wind is God’s face forced full of feathers falling from
foul figures who fluid their flight forward finding the rain ever willing to feed the black
man’s body born of a bold beliefs that he can build bodies upon bodies to reach the heaven
of his brother. Be my brother’s bitterly bony body born of his mother’s flesh, be my bold
brother that bully the bones of a burdensome belief in a God that built his home in the
heated heart harden and hurried, hung and haggard in its hunger for faith that is flung full
footed with foolish fortitude filed on the grinning wheel of the cross where is hung the
bloody body with nails rusting on the backside as the bebop born to bop you is buying its
time by being busy with the business end that concern you when the sea open its depth
wide to swallow us.

The body of a black man is stretched across the night, its grotesque fatherhood is the step
son of liberty caught between slavery and the crimes of the blood done in the egalitarian
rain running round the mulatto who scorched his skin in a tan under the justifiable sun

8
abolishing the rain once prosecuted by the Christian slave holders who supported the
vanguards leading the way toward racism taught to children running barefooted between
trees of condemned men, condemned by ready rope waiting patiently, by the cottonwood’s
strength tarred beaten feathered by pigeons rosebreasted grosbeak and by the white wind
blowing the jaw bone of its prize. Hear all the lynched bodies that cry “Americus I am your
crime never forgotten by the sacrificial tongue! I am the rope burn around your history! I
am the hands chained to the machines humming their monogeneses of moans meaning to
warn the wayward against wandering into the wilderness where the doing by the hands is
all that shall concern thee when the judgment come calling.” For a man to set free be fat of
feet to cry out it is me

The body of a black man in stretched across the earth, stymied by the iron-fisted absolute
human dignity of slaves’ work songs making their escape from the spiritual, songs as
poignant and yearning and smart as Brer Rabbit of the city park, the modern American
black man is Brer Rabbit incarnate to his American brothers, he is part Africans that flies
little by black birds calling massa with a yessuh, yessuh massa ringing down through the
extent of his cowardice that war the dices. I am such a man in my right knocked about
battled and bullied by bullets born of my heroism fit to be lying down. The socket of my
question is simple, discolored and taxing, the very roads of my nose, the lanes of my lips
where words play leads to the oldest human heart, the depth of my over exaggerated skin
with it propensity for American poverty is born body bold with a Jackal’s justification. The
measure of the rhythm of my hair is well kept by the dread locks of Jamaica trees home
grown home hammed locks hangs light its new growth girlishly it guard my brain once
tamed by the whip that worked my dark flesh under the soiled sun shinning like a girlish
God grilled and grounded as a great get-through that got the angry rhythm riding the rim
round the root of a riot rousted by rust.

The body of a black man is stretched across the earth where rabbits tickling and licking his
underbelly are wishing to nature what is needed beneath a map of the nearest knob-nose
knowledge found by the opossums that climb up to ride along his back bone. The bats wing
his hair. Under his body the animals are working on Tiger’s farm and Leopard woman is
chasing Bush cows. The monkeys are tiding bobcat’s tail to the black man’s ankle. The
yellow dog is talking to Blackbird and Ringdove about the curse of the birds while Lion
and Jackal are saving the rain as Tortoise gives underrated praise. Hyenas are following the
elephant’s hips. Hare and Spider are off to visit Spider’s fiancée’s parents in heaven.
Squirrel is robbing Rabbit of his tail. Eagles and hawks are afraid of fowls. Brer Fox and
the Tar Baby play awful Mr. Wolf. The Pig is nosing the Baboon’s rear as King Buzzard is
spying down. On the body of the black man stretched is the gratitude of an ounce of oozing
air odd and odorous in an ounce of offspring owing their ownership of order given to the
self assured mark made on the forehead of the faithful followers who kneel on the Bible to
pray for foul forgiveness fast with faith found in the future of a formal prayer. The black
man cup his hands and drawn them, he is unprepared for the everlasting energy of eternity,
for the notion that man shall fall into disuse when the last God leave the earth for better
real estate. Yes it shall come to past when the science of the body is all known by the body
that holds it. Nature has decreed that there is to always be something of us kept as secret
from our self’s the black man can not fully tell who he is.

9
The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt that is as dark as him, as crusted with
history as a tongue tied into a knot, as stubborn as a child crying for its metamorphosis
mother, as carved up as an African mask’s enthusiasm, as bleached a dingy dark by night
polluted by light, as right as the need for whiskey in need of a brown paper bag. Both man
and dirt hunger the worst that man can do and do again along the sixteen blocks roadway
where piety with its spat heretical petty splashing in a pool of conscienceless confederating
that is feeding on the considerations pined against the wall of a fragile cannibalistic quarter
that deceived the children who hunger for their father who are behind the bars of gratitude
in the slaughter house of leisure where the wheels that governs the grinning of its growth
gifted with green gravures of the quick quarter. Quite quiet and quick the black man quarrel
with himself, he quite on one hand that there is a gilded gifted God of glory and gracious
giving of its mercies. On the other in the place of order Nature is the quite God that rules
life by her living and loving of the long latitudes of it

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt where the savage death of freedom
comp an attitude against the miseries that is a mirage emphatic as being alone in the
hideousness of fire’s embrace, burning the collapsed mouthful of fraternal consumption
and contempt for the restless fallen hour that morn the conflagration of voices crying out
for a singular word birthed out of their ignore. The word was made flesh and from then on
was the knowledge of death known. The black man’s soul is tied in a knitted knot knighted
by his belief in a foreign God that has broken his heart with the Holy Ghost power held by
the pound as a put down near-about where a God knows the color of a race then is he
blinded by little babies born the color of wheat, the clears color of sleek, del la sol my
amigos.

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky, his human fatigue docile against the
Ten Commandment given in a famished year to the ancient itching etching of the souls of
the chosen people who thirsted for the unimproved fireworks tormented by the benevolent
meant to heal wounds made when man was a child playing God by the fire of the sun that
burns the sea form relieving itself on the bleached beach by secrets of frenetic miners of
fishes in the water forest growing with generosities found in the mouth of a wayward wave
breaking its spectacle of collapsed brotherhood growing modest as morning also breaking
when the sun mounting the sky imprisoned by man’s body screaming its convulsions there
where the four windows corners of our world wisely will be folded into a compost church
where the birds worship their rhetoric rigged round riding the realms ready for the rills,
ready to reel in the ancestral dawn’s part of the soul sold sadly and simply shyly to the
church where the prodigious tadpoles voyage the sea of their hunger. The black man is
built of the dark muscles of reemerging memories, to each baby born to bull the Christ,
each body that will taste their taste, each tasting a task, each task taken till time tell the
foretold. Youth will old away from its oddness owing an ounce of age edged by the
goodness that Gods can do. Youth will gray away its girlishness that guard the grand
ground of childlike crimes committed to the completed cooperation of the body. Youth will
bend its back to bones and lastly be bury by the bull head bum who built the high rise
building back when he was once caught in the everything of anywhere Americus, when he
was worthy of the upper middle class caught in the creature comfort of the work a day

10
world. The black man remembers his youth in a land nearly forgotten. He remember the
history of the soil, the vegetation the coming of the mulattos. He remember Thebes, Thines
and Napata.

The body of a black man is stretched across the night.

Who will tear the moon from his naval, who will eat his ripe prick, who will be his prophet
at large, who can hold him close around the neck of his missionaries insult, who will and
when wean themselves from his nipple and his fountain of tears when climate of his season
injury the confidence of his offense? Who is the priest of the pauper piled high with pity
and pride, pitted against the pets that paw at human forgiveness? Who can save the poor
pulling at his belly where a crumb hurt as a grain of sand turned into a pearl? Who will
save the souls of the hungry as sweet as homey honey, as honeyed eyed as the child that
sleeps in a box beside the heat vent of the street? Who can save man at the precise moment
when hell flood the streets of St. Louis and hang beautifully by the heat of consuming the
skeletons that subpoenaed the incrusted monsoon as ancient as the splendid musky and
clumsy rain that run riot round the sambo-mosquitos. O black man, O chumbo, O
cimarrone, O cimarró O bozale, brothers, brothers all we bother to build our future on your
backs, we look back in wonder that you wounded maintained to birth your offspring,
maintain against the whip and the 200 lashes that leaked your blood. We know that you are
unsung, underrated, unappreciated, underlings of the greater cause you unsung heroes, you
common foot soldiers that marched in Salem Alabama in a fat year of dogs and water hose,
you who never broke your blackness from your bones, brothers your children have grown
to mannered manhood sometime marooned as they mop the halls of justice. O brave and
noble race why should we wait to be vindicated at the pearly gates? The Christian God
never deliver his own sermon for he have forgotten how to speak the language of man he is
a tin God of a toy to boy us as he do when we are the rue that thickening to stew

The body of a black man is stretched across the night and ten thousand tears shed in one
year are filled with minnows that whip their tails in the weight of the wee hour of a
hundred years. The electrified concrete and old steel of evil water have lost their
confidence in being an accomplice with hands that takes a turn at misleading the satanic
challenges that we make against the justice of force for the nostalgic yellowish wash of the
delirious sun. O black man, black man, brothers both to bother our busy words, brother by
bold blood that leak by brother’s hands. It is as black as black can be. It is as bothersome
with it bully ways born of the back biting burses buried in your history. Man has wounded
the back of the black man but he endure to endorse the faiths of the Gods

The body of a black man is stretched across the earth of compulsion for the last anguish he
toss with trembling heart to the old lust of European overrated desires encircled with blood
smelling of tea and rum plowing the field where memories are planted to free the history of
pulse beating the beautiful egotism of a machine gun unappeased by the obscene dignity
precious and filled with accumulated madness heap in the heart of a lost love leaving a trial
of blue blooded blood. The new news is always old blue a spark in the test tube where
man’s seeds swim in the semen that blew the blues on our tongues and we are born badly
like a biting bit by bullies who roams the dark streets of black men’s body like lovers of
boys who are tender of age and sexual ways and care not for the skirts of girls who wish to

11
train and tame the poetic nature of the prick itself always on the look for a hard table leg to
rug against.

The body of a black man is stretched across the earth, he laugh his thunder loud as a proud
glory, as a prince of wooden warriors carved by time, warriors that vomit in the hold of a
slave ship, warriors that enchant the forest, warriors of weariness found amid the noble
adventure recognized by the hard march of men looking to bring home the prize found in
their cowardice, warriors in the shape of black fathers marching away from their sons who
longs for a hard hand to hold, warriors of the masterpiece of pride untiring the poverty
found in the uninhibited industrious cities hiding the defense of machines in the fruit on the
tree that droop heavily heavenly with pedantic tears, warriors victoriously wounded by the
warriors of slavery fighting in Peru, warriors of Chem at Nowe, at Memphis of old, of old
Thinis, warriors of Khufu and Cushites, warriors of the Libyans, the Ethiopians, the
Nubian and the Thebans, warriors of the talking drums heard when the Spider that
outwitted the rich woman, heard for Mwiundo the little one just born, he walk the baby
rivers running, he dance round about the darkness of his skin.
He who went to sleep wake up, he walk calling you home again.

You have no power against Mwindo,

Mwindo is the little one born he walks.
He who went to sleep wakes up.
Look, I am playing with my conga scepter.
Though Muisa slay Mwindo
And I shall die,
Muisa, you are really helpless against Mwindo,
Against Mwindo, the little one just born he walks

The little one just born he walk toward the city of a hundred gates when black Egypt turned
brown and white, when the mulattos came, when the blacks were scattered in a force
migration when the whites came, when the blacks was chained with the bloody irons
smelling of their names, the chains forged by the hands of slaves to enslave their brothers.
The little one just born he wakes, he walk, he wink at going astray, he weep and wish out a
wheeze of praises. The little one just born he walks the city of the common grave when the
Christens came to change our names.

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt and ancestral Christianized tom-toms
growing from his skin where cries of treason against the fate of Christianity wilted in the
light of nature as the one true God. The lotus eaters are gathering in the lake to be baptized
by the bats beating their wings back against the black skin of a sudden pride caught in the
order of hands luminous and extremely humble by the thumb that poke itself in the eye of
the sun when the bird of pray circle the disorder of the flesh breaking down deep and done
drawn and quarter by the whip in the town square fatigued from seeing so much murder
done in the name of a God that darken his skin in a desert walk, wandering through the
cathedral of sand his aim was to save man but mindful man resisted the salvation of his
spirit for the appetites of his flesh in a fat year where the fat of an apple is picked from the
tree of carnal knowledge and the fat of the criminal tree is burning back its bark by the bail

12
bondman’s bounty booming its bulky bullwhip by the bee’s building honey combs better
then man made homes of bricks mixed with blood.

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt, he illuminates the hummingbird’s
wings beating back the strong winds that beam the gentle alcoholic quicklime of luminous
deafness of a heard germination of femininity, he illuminate the exultation of reincarnated
joy of a beautiful prophesy in the form of a beautiful boy spoken for in the temperament of
a figurehead unique to the germination of a tyrannical universal hunger that thirst for the
drunken blemishes found in the promiscuity humble and yet callused in the muscles that
brace the horizon weeping under water. He illuminates the locomotive secret of sorcerers
that break the wounds of water flowing it’s deform currents of thirst. He illuminates the
trade winds blowing its speech of reasons gaping it’s proclaim strength apocalyptic as a
tornado of volcanoes gigantic with blisters. He illuminates the negritude found in a baby’s
fist. He illuminates the business end of earth by parasites. He illuminates every star,
omnipotent but injured by an enormous bone bloated and bound by pestilence. He
illuminates the fat of his liver trapezoidal as second class citizens draping themselves with
an unexpected respect for control. He illuminates the white God that tells us to be good
niggers to accept our servitude without complaint, to bare our burden as fresh milk midst
the udders of a cow holy in the streets of India. We will not willfully listen, we won’t
worry wild the wish wontedly to woo the wounded woman who sell herself in the market
place of commerce. The whore is nothing without his customers. The corporate whore that
sell his wares in the temple, the priestly whore that lust after the altar boy, the priest
whishing to sell his flesh for the favoritism of the Gods, the political whore selling his vote
to the highest bidder, the military whore selling his body for a change to wage a war,
whores of the world they all are young and old alike they fight to maintain their whorish
ways, they are all allied owning and the black man is a whore for words strung around his
neck like a crusted crucifix drawn and quartered by the whip of smack back licks that tips
the tongue tired tone telling time told by the knowable known.

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky he is held captivated by the conquering
fire of the sun and the invented motion of the moon. He is breathing for the entire world.
He is reconciled by the exultation of his survival. He is the resentment of meditation on the
uniqueness of his sable race rocked by slavery and the religion of fornication that seeks to
preserve the tyrannical nation of his intermittencies imposed by a God stolen from his
master who taught the Bible with a whip to make the calluses of his laboring hands humble
and for free hire by the holy words. He is stretched over the veinlets of trees and the veins
of rivers forever running wild till man temporarily take away their force but there is always
something wild about the hinged river that overflows its banks and floods the land;
something willing to pass on the grim of the mercenary water in the conflagration of
spring. The ancestors are gathering to free us from our orders issued by our suppressors,
and the warriors who have done the flesh of their lives by the dirt; the joyful jolly of
warriors is all that was not taken from us. The indigent throat of warriors drifts its
compulsion of membranes like the last train leaving history behind and their whisper of
words wave across the great water washing away the girdle wind that confess its confusion
invented by the flamboyant roll call of dead name. When the ancestors come calling us to
command the fatherhood of our forgettable distant with its counter-thrusts pushed and

13
pulled by a startled bird with its shoulder to the griming wheel then they will come to know
their lost fathers. The black man in his darkness is calling forth his black Gods lost to
history but have yet to earn an appearance; his Gods are now silent as if dead. As the mask
was once a tree as the tree was once a seed, as the seed was once a fruit and that fruit once
a blossom things by the precept of time changes and so too Gods die on the human tongue
as surely as they sweat from our pores.

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky spilling the scum of freedom from the
lungs when the ancestral dawn blooms dangerously close to the closed door that leaves to
the marvelous innocence hour where the meat of a flower perform the unlimited dance of
desperation. He is that he is buying his freedom with cold cream to lighten his skin like the
man in the mirror of mimicking the fair skinned race that ignores him. The black man with
bushy hair is howling gigantically at the bronze blazing children falling feet first from his
belly when the wee hour full of desolate deceit calls him to task; to harvest the contempt
heap upon his back bone like old oak trees in a row whose roots twisted and twined around
his body are searching for the true beat of his fatigue heart. His blood rich thirst of hunger
is to know the truth of America’s clumsy tenderness of guttural gossip about growing a tail
in the midnight hour. In the wee hour rising up from shadows hiding under cars there is to
be found the sounds of miniscule fear beating its fist against the gusts of anguish.

The black man is stretched across the night, the only thing that is darker them him. The
black man bold in his skin color, bold in his impartial boredom, bold in his hunger for the
famine of freedom drenched by the bloated bellies born in the mother land have learned not
to fear the dance of drums dazzling the spectacle of his bold blood knowing that it is as
ancient as the breath of man.
The black man is stubborn in his blackness, he wear it well in the little cell of incarceration,
wear it well as prisoner and jailer of the absurd. His persistent is legendary in its
prohibitions, his crimes against himself is the apostate of modem man O brave race of
daggers of blackbirds, O exultation of quivering laughter your power is bold by the woman
that birth you, O shade of the shadow that hides you in the promises of a heaven of corpses,
O bold brothers caressed by the rain the last implacable train of voluptuousness is leaving
the station of complete jazz. O beautiful, O bodacious, O blood of my sisters and brothers I
salute your authenticity that have endured through the ages.

14
 Ode to Beauty

O beauty, beauty the great boundaries of your cutting blaze is the throat that preach the
holy way known to the souls lost in the armpit of a shriveled city where what remain of the
overgrown growth hoping to gain a foothold is the resistance of the concrete to mother the
motion of grass. Beauty you are my Venus of ashes, my cold sealing wax of new graves
dug in the palm of my hand. Beauty you are the seawater breathing hundreds of gills full of
tears that rush upon the breach of my thighs. You are a mountain of heavenly lies ancient
as finding yourself struggling encased in a plastic drop. You empty the sky. You are the
sleepless skeleton that we pray by, lay by, and in vain wait by, and you are the tongues that
speak of the proslavery of children born with a gun in their hands when only they can
defend the beauty of the sun.

O beauty, beauty shall I kiss your hair that hides the summer birds, your cheeks flush with
worm’s blood grounded in a gorge grinning its grain gorgeously by the geese’s cries? Shall
I keep you safe in my breast pocket of tenderness taught to the young who keep their youth
tight between the shoreline of their fingernails? My pockets are filled with gravity, yours
with the rose’s thorn fit for making torn love’s fluency bleed with the blood of angels who
worship at the chemist’s shoulders.

O beauty, beauty forever defying the whispering motion of who you shall call to task, you
are my hands I take them from you, you are my legs mad with your strength, you are my
eyes eating the quite, low mourning of an exquisite cry, you are my melancholy telegram
issued by the governor of cold fishes, none is your equal for everything is caught in the tail
wind of your pulverized breath. O beauty, O moon the same, O sun that drain away
beauty’s face from the terrify cover of everything caught within your middle age grace
where the rivers runs like deserted streets sweep by a wind lost in the corroders of the
landscape of the city. You bite once you have bitten the body. You build after buying time
by the barrels full of the yearning of the soul shown by the complexities of poetry; your
show of words that woo words.

O beauty, beauty when will you be washed away, when will you cub your waves, when
will you taste the equilibrium of gunpowder used as your shade against the musical
muscles of the brave? When will you remember the wreckage of eyeglasses and the
millions of pigeons that people the accommodating sky? When will you free us from the
machines delirious by your perfume, fragile by a blue perspective that sleeps in a
circumcision?
When will you sing the signs of the cross when the newly created Mr. Ross sees your
beauty but still doubt that you are but an illusion an ill fit fixed to beauty that claims itself
by the homeless man that eats pizza crust from the dumpster found just around the corner
from Beauty and Time, both fade fair. The beauty found in the black man’s hair and the
beauty that loves a man in a uniform along side the beauty that uniform a nation. Beauty

15
you are the hard half behind my hidden horror hiding haunch and huddled within your
marrow.

O beauty, beauty you are the tambourine of my memory, you are the bare back black boy
that builds industry nursing at the breast of the Mississippi ignorant of St. Louis. Few are
your column of comrades, few who will weep at the gasoline of your feet, you are the first
fire fruit eaten, and you are the nudity of a Sycamore leaf falling at the crack of dust
dawning; the split opening in night hiding under cars. No one will avoid you. Many seeks
to repeat your delight, yes many; the given boy and the gave to girl that plays at
prostitution, even your enemies with the sleeplessness of their hurtful poison are sons and
daughters of your bitter beauty born in the belly of a burned beast roasting its nude pillow
beside the bride of breeze in branches.

O beauty, beauty, solitary in the public squares where classical pagan pigeon outwit man
with their inscription writ in feather. O beauty you are the museum of mirrors where-in is
seen the unforgettable statues of intimate tree trunks and your timeless blushing beauty that
burse the brute who buried you in the muzzle of a gun. Awake O beauty with your genuine
antiquity of tongues, awake my dark haired lover of the enormous weight of water. Awake
you furiously abandoned science of ignorant. Awake you rusty secret held in the blood of
poets that cry your suggestive wisdom, your voice is caught in the equilibrium that probes
the motion of a child on the run.

O beauty, beauty you are to me as the common water that runs in my veins, a blessed thing.
You are to me as the as the light of my design to praise thee. O beauty may you ware out
your shoes on the tongues of the poets, give them the time to tell tall tales told timidly in
defiance to your beauty born in the belly of a baby building it body bold by the bodache
breath of a newborn’s grip. Beauty, my baby my body my bones my budded you got my
back with it bold black just tight in beauty it tugs tight when the sun is tall to tell the time
tired to a whisper. O worn wise willing beauty of the world when will you woo the woman
wearing the woody wind. Beauty you are kin to a kind of kindling used to break the beauty
of a mistress that calls poets to ball the bouncy and bully the bulk of their beautiful words
woven with winds willing to wild the beauties that are bruises on my skin. You are the
everything of my memories that can not master your beauty. You are the hard work of the
flesh; the quick hand of a raccoon that commits seduced suicide behind the wheel where
the lust of greed that guard the grin reaper’s beauty is telling time till the beauty of a tongue
taught to teach the young that knows less beauty the beauty of being born.

O beauty, beauty the blind roses are in bloom, the mute noon is in bloom, the loose noose
blooms in the desert. Beauty cut me loose with your terrifying news of how the shirt drinks
the blood of a fatal blow, there is beauty there, in the grave yard where the wind steals its
way across the goodness of a given grave and the crows calls out beauty and the robins

16
catches it worm where the dead ones lays beauty gives no judgments in its play. O beauty
when will you slash me open and peel back my skin to let beauty in? When will you cut a
tear in two to have me love you? When will you prim the trees that grow from my
fingernails when the beauty of the Gods has forgotten to pray their praises. With cut-throat
precision you feed me, flee me, keep me hard headedly you teach me. Beauty you are

O beauty, beauty we cry out to you as a wounded leaf to the wind, you are the murmuring
landscape of our target, you who were murdered by the astonishment of nocturnal desires
held in the knife hand of a fluid compliant against the Gods who have abandon all the little
animals within your arms. You are the evident of your epidemic. You are the ecstatic
insistency that hesitate and tremble your strangle suffering of the heart that harvest a
profusion of miracles held in a pleasing face, the non-evasive face utterly beautiful as to
ensnare the criminal from his extraordinary deeds done down by the disheveled docks
doped by trash. O beauty, beauty stripped of the anger of forgotten things, beauty delicious
as atmosphere and flamboyant as the free odor of the triumphant sexual desires, cavernous
and corrosive that commands thee. O beauty, beauty born in the baby’s breath bathed by
the boisterous bounty of their growing body, I boast of you born bare bathed by the eyes. I
am your frantic fan who worships with the tongue and I hold none as your equal; none can
match your make free for the world to see, you, yes you are all that matter my mother, my
bride, my lover. My male mate made more beautiful by the moment that moves across the
moans of the moon. I salute you.

Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca

O Federico, now long in the limbs of your death the boys who set by the big muddy
Mississippi river and dreams that the river is nude are damned by the selfish love of the
would be misunderstood righteous bastards who people the eight points of the cross,
damned to Hell to Purgatory
To the Naraka of the Buddhist, to the Dya of China, to the Duat of Egypt, to the Niflheim
of Germany, to the Hades of Greece, to the Jahannam of Islam
To the Jigoku of Japan, to the Gehennom of Judaism, and to the Yomi of the Shinto

17
O Federico, the river is forever making love to the banks that runs like children caught in
the shadow of the moon and your statue in the Plaza de Santa Ana is suffering from the
depression of a red kerchief used to blow the nose of an evil butterfly

O Federico, only the worms knows where your body is to be found where between cities
are your bones, still I shall tell you what is up. The blacks are at it again mining the history
of the whites to fit in.

O Federico, the boys in their wedding grown are making love to the psychedelic fantastic
realism of the machines that calls our names while the wheat fields are attacking the crows
dressed up in their Sunday feathers, only the best for the best, only the finest for the crows
staled passerine.

O Federico, only the Blackbirds knows the secret hiding place of the mid night Sun God
that war against the stars when the sky falls and collect in the gutter where the homeless are
fishing, but the wisdom of the rain will not feed them, will not fend for them, will not
issues its cleaning praises heard above the insistence propaganda of thunder.

O Federico, the boys are going home from the midnight last call wounded by the alcoholic
art of the drunken poets who have given over their sex to the denial of the church that Jesus
smelled his own musk in the desert walk and longed for the flesh of other when nobody
slept. No-no nobody is asleep beneath the cooling heat of the light of misplaced stars, no-
no nobody.

O Federico, the river is bloated like a known nude corpse long in the bourbon color water
where turtles are nibbling at the knees of a quiet pain and the shadows of trees are dancing
in the rain to the dehumanized music of machines use to keep us young and sane.

O Federico, Dya exist in the eye of a butterfly, Naraka exist in the bodies of worms, Duat
can be found in the blood soaked proboscis of mosquitoes
Niflkeim exist in the mist of a fart traveling through the body of a dark cloud hung from the
stars. The deep body of Tartarus exists in the place within the manifested yawning void of
the holy chaos of a lost God beating his cross against the primordial night, three layers deep
that it can not weep or fight back against the assault of the moon. Diyu is imprisoned by
Yanlao Wang who also imprison the Devil until the time he atone for the greedy sin of the
sane who pitch a penny to the homeless drunk on the rain and dancing down the Shirley
Temple stairs beside the dark foot steps of a hoofer wide eyed ya! Federico, the black are at
it again with wide grins and bugged eyes the stereotyped southern draw dancing the jazzy
Hot Mikado.

O Federico, the sky is sweating into the river that brush against St. Louis along Broadway
where muddy white kids are dreaming of Bo jangles running backward in a forward world.

O Federico, the machines are at it again eating the flesh of workers who have made money
and credit the new found God, whose breath smells of plastic and oil mined off shore in the

18
gulf of disbelief where the water is stained and stagnate by the blue breath of fishes washed
a shore to be a play thing to boys who care nothing for the sex to be found under the skirts
of girls dreaming of changing their minds and the natural aperture of their sexual appetites.

O Federico, the whites are at it again enslaving the rivers that runs like vein in the body of
mosquitoes sucking the blue blooded notion that the poor are poor because someone has to
be lost in the economic currency of the state.

O Federico, O Garcia Lorca, O proud poet who never hid your sex in the button up coat of
a brown skin night walking the dingy dark streets of Madrid where the Manzanares
smelling of the Moors who lost their ethnological value to the history of brandy skin in
oceania melanin of the protist pigment sleeping sickness of a tsetse fly in the dark country.

O Federico, a river of machines is humming and buzzing busy as bees buying their time till
they flood-fill the thimble of the Gods’ desires be fulfilled, the Gods will sew together the
slender bodies of pubescent boys playing and bathing in the suggestive lake of Whitman’s
desires, out of the cradle endless rocking in the river that washes over their bodies tinted by
a love that dear not speak its name in the crowed fields of the sexual insane.

O Federico, O my Spanish lover of words kept in the breast pocket of Generacion del ’27
the Ultraist shall follow you pass the unmark grave where your statue is a cenotaph erected
by the guilt of the living who claim you in death. Your dark eyes are full of the boy’s
desires toward the muzzle of the bed where the blushing wounds weeping its wreckage of
flesh is the music of a man’s muscles meaning to entice you out of your silent.

O Federico, peaceful ruler of words like a fox you mapped the landscape of New York with
your bowtie around its neck and the Blacks welcomed you as if you were a long lost child
come home to the dead river running round the neck of the lynched flesh hanging from a
southern Cottonwood.

O Federico, O Garcia, O Lorca, O lover of boys loco for the flesh of men, O Maricas you
cut a fine figure of a handsome man, your figure bounded by the beauty of words washing
over the ages that got lost in the everything river made by time, wet with rimes, ripped with
the sexual desires of fishes, ripe with righteousness riding on the grim of the public water
where secrets are held deep in the currents. Your river of poem rush in between my thighs
and I can but smile to absorb your poetic wisdom beneath my skin. Let my breath make
love to your poems. Let my meandering mind make crazy love to your words that tremble
on my tongue like the tenderness of violins

O Federico, like Whitman we are liken in ways beyond our art; beyond our habit to the pen,
our love of men, our singular want of the taunt flesh tight on the bones, we will not study
war no more but forever love, we will not praise the Gods of willing wars walking the
battle fields where youth is murder by the muzzle of a gun, the new toys of black boys
hiding in their skin.

19
O Federico, my comrade, my hermano. Ay hermano! Ah, eres tứ that I follow into the bars
where words are sweating from the forehead and chest of the boys dancing shirtless on the
dance floor to the back beat of a fish simmering toward the sexual bump and grin of their
passion.

O Federico, the gays are at it again meeting in the drunk wooded parks they keep their
sexual desires zipped up till a stranger’s hand release their passion held in the loins they
suck the darkness of spoiled sons never to be born, fresh sperms are swimming pass the
tongue.

O Federico, I remember the time Ginsburg kissed me and I sucked the poems on the tip of
his generous lips, his genius was in being kind and concern for the heath of the world, he
was tender to the boys who stood naked before his aging flesh, they kept him young; a sort
of youthfulness that reside beside the wisdom earned by one living in their time.

O Federico, I remember walking along side Burroughs with his silent cane tapping on the
walkway of Colorado University toward a peyote trip swimming in my head, we were
silent but I heard the clouds speaking in the slow draw of Burroughs’ St. Louis voice
adding up the machines one by one, the murderous clouds came alive with orange and
crimson rain and the crime of the day arched over the setting sun and the late August moon
looked down perplexed that two St. Louis writers could lose themselves in silent.

O Federico, Hell is at it again enticing man to do his worst, the rivers are at it again
draining the land of its worth, the boys are at it again gathering in the sexual darkness
where the secrets of the sexes plays out their desires. The sky is at it again weeping,
weeping exquisite silent as if it was the blush of a young man. The machines are at it again
rotating their grinning noise to the whisper of clouds and the lost desires of boys who drop
their pants before the face of the government. The blacks are at it again rapping the words
of the sexual Gods caught in the headlight of MTV. The whites are at it again pushing the
American way of submission to the highest order found in the purse of a dormant race that
bares the black man’s burden

O Federico, O my flesh skinned beauty O my dark haired lover I shall teach your wisdom
to the youngsters. I shall forever praise your name in the streets from St. Louis to Denver;
from Boston to San Francisco and the boys of industries shall find comfort between the
legs of their misplaced desires played out in the bed of warm darkness where they are
dreaming of Whitman. O my poetic mentor the machinery’s rhythm with its agony of
sleeping winds has taken control of tobacco color Americus and the dusty delirium of a
sexual act infinite and falling from the marrow of sweat formed in the fable that shall wrap
its arm around the waist of your poems I love you forever.

O Federico, O father the futures of your words I too bent what is said. O fugitive of what is
read the red reality ride the ribbon real rail ready and giddy by the girlish gush that grow on
the skin of our mistrust. Here is the truth of the warring colors. Here is the fox of your
name, here the New York of your labor that plays out upon the stage. Garcia guides me,

20
glue me gifted in his wisdom woven round the wrong doing that I did in words. Wisdom
sue me to understand, cash my coins of pens used to write the salt of a tear.

Morning News 1

The body of an unidentified automobile

Was found to be carrying Saturday
Morning after it ran a stop department
In the St. Louis metropolitan area.
Traveling at a high rate of speed
The 25 years old automobile was shot
And wounded by the police
As it speed westbound just south of 5:45 a.m.
St Louis gave chase, firing several shots
At the fleeing highway.
It is reported that the estrange automobile
Was mechanically wounded
That it hit a road sign, then a tree
And lastly overturned spilling spring
Out over the city
Clean up is expected to continue for the next three mouths.

Body of unidentified
Black man about 25
Was found Sunday morning
In a north side trash dumpsite

21
Shot in right arm, shot in chest
Strangled with a tie, lift around his neck
Red and brown intercepting lines, wide cut
Out of style, heavily stained
One toe unfound, athlete feet at its worst
One finger cut through, nails full of dirt
Where grew a young peach tree bent toward earth.

All I Wanted to Do

All I wanted to do
Was to love you
Yet my black folks
Can be so cruel
When I don’t subscribe
To their adopted
White man’s rule

For the Color Folks

for Pat

Black folks make yellow

Look like it was meant to be
And red, like it just gonna
Jump out at you on the streets
Green aint never been greener
Save for through and thorough leaves
And blue is so cool on black skin

22
Lord you think it’ll snow at 90 degree.
You know I think that God must dha made
Color just for showing off black folks
Cause a black woman in white is a definite win
And distant stars without blackness just aint got no kind of light
And you know that gold can have no richer glow
Then against our darkest skin.
Now white folks in the sun just can’t keep
From turning black
But they go around peeling -can you imagine that!
I say that God sho made color for showing off black folks
Because we go together like the guest and the host.

Pregnancy is walking

Pregnancy is walking through

High schools now
Cocked legs and
Cock cocks too
Condom, you say
They will get them
When their need them
But boys that young
Are day dreaming
Of being men
And have just begun
To experiment with skin.

23
Beneath the Moon

1
Cold spotted rain fall
Puddle ripple the moon
Alley cat hunched under
Tipped over waving pool.

2
In the air
His perfume
In the wine glasses
The blushing moon.

3
Hand of a cloud
Milking the moon
Of all its yellow
Its light
And old ash.

Beneath
The moon
If God
Puts Its
Hands
Around me
Will I find
Dirt in Its nails?

5
In each city Wild Irish Rose
Will float with MD 20/20 vision
To show you the Night Train
To the Thunderbird
Drunk on the moon

24
My Sons Needn’t Pay Homage

My sons needn’t pay homage

To the Statue of Liberty
Her back have always been turned
We saw not the light of her torch
But the shadow of her raised hand
Her unbroken lips never spoke
Her copper ears never heard
That behind her for years
Was voices yearning

I’m a Bad Assed Mother Fucker

I’m a bad assed mother fucker

Who would rather fuck fathers
And if you think it reflects badly on our race
Wait!
I’m still capable of producing children
Tho it wont end my father fucking ways
Now hold on

25
If’n I was as bad as I make out to be
I wouldn’t use the word fucker to tease,
Bad ass fuckers are cruelly direct
Cuss them out, they think you’re
Having trouble breathing
Come on up- slice you open
Let in all the air you aint needing
But I was born into a bad assed fucking world
Sharpened my teeth on the western St. Louis streets
Armored my heart with the petrified cotton dust
From the lungs of my gramp
Thicken by blood with U.S.D.A cheese
And powder milk supplement
Build my muscles on caned meat
Feed my brain on Jack and Jill
I’m a bad assed fucker who’ve been fucked
Without pleasure received
Wait, wait, wait one fucker’s minute
I’m degrading that subtle increase
In body heat
I’m profaning that sweat rapture
In ecstasy
I’m blaspheming the other side of man’s spiritually
But you see it’s a bad asser’s attitude
It’s a fucking make believe
A reaction to being mind fucked for centuries

SOU CITY

In the wake of Kali’s second range

The 40s 50s gave my home town boy Burroughs, William, Billy B beat Kerouac belling out
to 60s’ hip-hip-hippies turned Abbey’s yippee into 70’s puppies and 80’s yuppies turned
90’s rap a hip-hop black.

BE WITH YOUR BOP BABY

Human beat box blackening down the street of sou-cent-city

St. Louis’ hippies section now yuppies’ trinkets of big cookies and silk flowers

26
More concern with antiques then the homeless on the streets.

BE WITH YOUR BOP BABY

Come on home Burroughs, run away as Elliot or driven as Tennessee, come on home and
see the few bent back against night worshipping Sivas’ prick in the
Cosmic dance of swallow.

MY BOP BE BOPPING ON ME BABY

In this season of spate rain that coats, glistens, connection rivulet crack my spinal bones
into a paralytic snip!

O’ St. Louis we are but a few who will decry the horror of our home
O’ city of my birth you have sucked up my anger in to your neutralizing laughter
O’ St. Louis, O’ saint on the river
O, skull-capped cathedral mosaic on Lindel
O, ninth Louis king long dead by the Seine
O, park side horseman with your bronze sword
O, Chouteau’s town the heavy eyebrows; I spa tho Spaniard and American long knives
paved
A road of wet bones to your bank back when they called you San Luis Del Yllinois
Now you boast of wide you throw open your gate
O, St. Louis I see the bones faces under your streets dressed in French names - Pierre
Chouteau, LeCled, Carondelet, Clair, Florissant Creve Core, Frontenac, Lac Du Bois, Des
Peres, Dupo, Giradadeau
Yet I know you St. Louis, chemical coffin city of macaroni and beer
Know that deep in your pockets are the brick harvester’s hands you hide
O, city of my birth in this your two-hundred twenty-fifth year I lament with
Breath lost between my love and dislike of you, for your earth section have
Vibrated with the first cut of my trembling legs
Your trees have felt the stretch of my youngest muscles, your air through
Mama; then I the full moon of her belly heard your rain echoed as her Mississippi
Blood pumped.
O, St. Louis I am of you as you will not be of me; my love against the hard birth
Of our spirit against the quick hands of our lawmen against us.
Your air fill me with words that sting as acid mist inhaled thorough my noise
Or swallowed pass the tongued and I rebel against our poverty as sure as if
your Slums grow as parricide on my skin
Yet I do not wish parricide of my riparian city
For it is not the Bremadagrass or Creeping grass bent low against the wall
Not the Starling, Blue jay or Sparrow’s red cedar nest where egg white drips on
Ash-green needles and mocking bird harass the hawk, it is not your land; velvet leaf
growing from the bricks of
Your abandon building or the blue of low cropped Day flower wild in a vacant
Lot nor the homeless in their home-city town who are suffered upon

27
Your blacks you have trample on
Your lower Southside Dutch Town, white kids muddier then the Mississippi
Racing pass their doors
The descendant of the Little Osage know your oppression one-hundred years more.
O, St. Louis, city of my birth, your wayward son, the mama’s boy have come
Home with the dust of Boston brushed from my shoes.
Come with open arms I find you awakening from your long sleep into decay,
You’re stretching your long limbs alone the Mississippi while the bed sores of your
northern side still fester.
O, my love, my hatred, city of my birth look into the people we are your
Mirror; see yourself clearer then there in the Mississippi muddy by the Missouri.

Miss Lucy, She’s in that Way

Miss Lucy, she’s in that way

Gonna have it now most any day
O Miss Lucy who’s that child
She say “fool, this here child’s mine”
O Miss Lucy, the daddy be?
She say “Joe Blow been touching me”
Now Joe Blow is a friend of mine

28
Aint seen em for quite some time
Called him on the telephone
He say “man, I’ve been alone
Nare aint no baby that I own”
O Miss Lucy say I Joe says no
Miss Lucy say “Its Joey’s tho “
But back Door Joey is a friend of mine
Three years now that boy been darning time
O Miss Lucy whose it be, done told
Two lies, don’t make it three
Miss Lucy say “ Its God own child”
Let the truth be known
O Miss Lucy is in that way
Gonna have it most any day.

I’ll Cry No More

I’ll cry no more, I’ll cry no more

I’ll scream no mouth swollen open for swallowing
Night’s air wet with the warm steam of the streets
With stars popping out as chill bumps
On the skin of the sky
With neo-circular moon yellowish in its fullness
And excited gaseous neon particles glowing
In their frenzy.
I’ll scream no more the trembling day air aflutter
With red breast and red winged blackbird’s sound
All rushing into me while you’re
In my rose, my rose gone blind
Welcoming the sum of your sons from you spitting eye.
I’ll cry no more but arch my black back
Back against the black of night and clutch
Grass grounded to its roots in this arching earth
While your erect prick of a humming bird’s tongue
In the reddish rose.

29
Sweat dancing on your chest and the sweating air
Sweet between us -sweet between us
Scrotum swing against in the hold-on rhythmic roll
Of rocks to explode- your long o-o-os your whooos-breezes
Sounds that cool my back in a city lost wind come home
I’ll sing your sighs in poems
And cry cries no more.

I Went to the Pawn Shop

I went to the pawn shop

To get some coins
But the man turned me down
Say he don’t take nothin’ broken
Especially black hearts
From out of town.

30
You Sho do Treat Me Good Baby

You sho do treat me good baby

Treat me good now that I’m gone
I say you sho do treat me good baby
So good now that I’m gone

I remember when I was around baby

You ran me right into the ground

Now I passed away four days ago baby

And now looking from my heavenly home
I see you crying at my funeral baby
Crying like life done done you wrong

O girl, you’re just to damn good to me baby

Too, too good now that I’m gone
If’’n I was back down there with you baby
You would be kicking- kicking me all over town.

All my friends I see there baby

Partying hardy at my wake
And you won’t touch a lick of liquor baby

31
Say you suffering a hard heart ache

O you are just to damn good to me baby

To damn good now that I am gone
If’n I had somebody as good as you baby
You know dat I never would’ve gone and died at all.

Old Mrs. Reagan Told Us to Just Say No

Old Mrs. Reagan told us to just say no

To the snow white girl, the rock candy cloud,
The smack boy horsing Mary Jane in the love boat.
But white powder and is o so sweet to kids
That get the green back bucks from the streets.
15 years old can make more money then her dad
Dad out there guarding the homes of rich folks,
More than mama who have given over her soul
To an absentee landlord, other wise called God
More then sister-woman pushing chemical infested burgers at the Mc.
More then brother-man poor black ass teaching capital addiction
To the disinherit who see every day of his life
The snow queen riches smiling down from billboards
Or hear the TV queen an advertisement king
Screaming Buy Me, Buy Me, Buy Me!
You aint shit without my sense, without my hair care,
Without my car style, without my bony thin look in a size two from six
You aint clean without my Tide clothe line fresh or
My sunlight in a bottle with its lemon fast cleaning formula
My cloud soft toiler paper for cleaning your ass,
You aint healthy without my low calories, low salt, low fat
You aint a man without my Brut super dry extra strength,
Buy 2 get one free to put every woman at your feet
You aint popular without my brand of beer
You’re funky if your breath don’t smell of Scope original mint .
Now scope this, capitalism thrives on addiction
Or is it that addiction thrives on capitalism?

32
Anthony Patton-Burton Wolfrang

Anthony, how white is heaven, clouds are the whiter

with grey belly storms of cement dust and coffee grounds
Brewing morning in the urban dome.

How green is heaven, leaves are the greener

Callow trees sparsely placed in the concrete raving
Causey to the South Platte River.

How blue is heaven, sky the bluer

Coal-fly ash and red brick powder flakes up a purple dawn
Blue pressure on fish’s eye is oily float and phosphate foam.

How black is heaven, holder of the morning star

Heaven how red, dogwood berries
How yellow the primrose petal
How iridescent male mallards’ feather

Anthony P.B. Wolfrang

One little, two little, three little in the rain
Sleeping in a tree hollow, in a rocky cave
Under viaduct over the South Platte, sniffing aerosol
They hang their lives to the broken name

One little, two little, three little tribes

Cut their skies on an eagles’ feather ride
And land scream to see her native born
Die and die time told by bones that bore
Porcupine quills, beads, and hair long.

Anthony and no harmony of selves

Earth scream Arapahoe-Cheyenne sun-dance cries
And alcoholic Sioux suicide drop Wolfrang to the
Wind River madly running in Wyoming
Why not on me Anthony

Earth scream, sky pulls its’ hair

Tear at eyes, beat head against Denver
Sun hide from heaven’s laughter, clouds hunch
Their backs and attack their reflection hung
In the office building’s artificial sky

33
Anthony!
I’ve come from the streets of Milwaukee,
Seen your tribe-men sitting in the shadows of Miller’s Valley
Burping the stale air of beer and wintering over steam
Vents of the streets while Pabst immigrants were
Cozy in their blue ribbon homes of White Fish Bay.

I've come from the streets of Boston, seen

Your tribe-men choked dust democracies bricks
For the commonwealth of Beacon Hill.

I’ve come from the streets of quaint Saint Louis

Its slums grew as parasites on my skin -that Sou-cent city
Of the Mississippi, treaty city of Sac and Fox
I’ve touched the stone that touched the thieving
Hands of patriarch William Clark

I’ve comes from the streets of Denver by way of the bad lands
Where I saw the bad assed buffalo burger bite in the Black Hills
Here under the stained aluminum sky of this
Mile high city bent at the Moon Shell River
Anthony, your blood swims toward the Wind River Reservation

In life Anthony, I’ve come half and you full

Your breath smelling of glue have come to the
Hunting ground long since happy
Yourself hunting yourself
Hunting in this white heaven, cloud heaven of leaves
Of sky heaven, until on you Anthony, harmony.

I Would Have Love to do Me Dirty

34
I would have love to do me dirty
To mud me over in earth
To tangle me in roots
Strong as limbs twisted bout
My hips,
To bury me in warm sand
-tide lapping between my thighs
To bloom irises from my tongue
To roll me grit, chalk, clay’s muggy musk
Mississippi creek water swelling roughly
Wet with life birthing love -busted open!
I want’na be stormed over by love
Drenched till each pore drown in its own ecstasy
Drained and dripped dried to swell again
Plumb as caucus’ flesh
Prickly and erect, punched by love.

Mellow Bones

Wrap your shroud

In blue cloth
It’ll keep it from
Turning yellow
And when you’ve laid
With it for many years
Your old bones will be mellow.

35
I Hear a Street Blues

I hear a street blues

Moving thru St. Lou
Who do you belong to who-do
Ears move long to
Hear a street blues
Who do you do to

Portrait of God

36
It’s breath smell so foul
With the circle of life and death
That my nose chokes
Within five life years of It’s present

It’s eyes so bright that I see

Darkness where there is light

It’s thoughts so crowed

That I’m madden by It’s noise

It’s memory so awesome

As to burn me from my boney core

It’s spirituality so great that

My atoms explode into suns

It’s sexual urgency make

Pregnant ovaries of my pores

And I birth convulsive burning

Chain reaction pain is pleasure, pain again

Life crawls out from the grave yard

Of my skin, pleasure slashes me open
And trees sucker in.

My nose swell with the corpuses

Of the dead, canker engross my genital

It explode alga rivers and

Kidney stone mountain
Whales swim in my semen

And in God there is no division

Only the inherently packed core of contradictions
From which we draw out
A square to call reality
And justify our human instance.

Poem Written on Two Lines by Countee Cullen

37
You marveled then
As many do now
At the curiousness
Of the thing
That after two-hundred years
On the freedom-go-round
We find that the
Brass ring has always
Been bolted down.

Working for the Woman

Sun offered me the job

Of speaking of its wonders
It’s wonder my payment
The easiest of spends

Moon employed me, night shift mostly

“Your job is to write of the union between us
the union between us your payment only”

Death hired me in public relation

My death as payment paid in the end.

38
I Like Sounds

On my tongue
Hunam, Canton, Pusan
Saigon, Managua aqua water
Phonon Penin
In and out of my mouth, Phonon Penh
Khmer Rouge; a fine red mare
Except to those intellectuals who read the words
Bullets bloomed red in their chests
A pipe against the head knock the life out
Hunam, a meditative sound fold-olding my breath
Who in know, question asked.
Canton, container catching green rain
Tin can kwang-chow of chu kiang American
Pusan, a sigh within calmness
Pus- after sex bubble up
-San from the sea of Japan, Nippon!

O Holy God My Father

For Emma Patton

39
O holy God my father
I raise a song to Thee.
When I get up in the morning
My soul began to sing.

There is power in Thy name

My soul will let it ring
O holy God my father
I sing this song to Thee

Thy name will heal the sick,

Will calm the troubled mind,
Will strengthen the weary stranger
My savior’s name divine

When I get up in the morning

When I lay my head to rest
I will worship Thee in song
From deep within my breast.

A Midsummer’s night

The north side of St. Louis

Like its sister across the river;
Boggy-city of the Mississippi
Is kinking in the fervid scorch
Of the city’s night.
There’re black youths on-a window pose,
Leaning against doors, kicking up and
Down the stained pavement, and
Propped against walls.
Some, their alcoholic bodies that
Two hours ago were hip-hop rapping
To the beat of human sweat and heat
Collected with cigarette smoke against
The dance hall’s ceiling sways or stagger
To reestablish their balance.
I wonder if in this whack-crack water night

40
If there will come disagreement when liquor
Speak and releases the hidden beast that poverty
Birth in the poor, the repressed, the thrown away,
The discontented young blacks who through the boiling
Day air held their tongues against emptiness
Packed so thick within them as to hiss from
The pores of their skin, like air forced out
From the corners of our eyes, or, will they remain
Suffocating in the dried red-brick powder air
Like the aged ones locked inside these heat packed
Homes, where plaster falls from the walls
To expose the fragile wooden ribs
And wounded hearts,
Cell by cell wasting apart.

The Expert Witness

I’m the expert witness

Witnessing to all
I’m the director
I’m testimony
I’m the commentary
Scientist expert
Technician, politician
Expert on candidates
And bars of soap.

I’m the expert

On who you what
You were when you
Will be and why
You wanna buy.

I’m the expert craftsman

Poet and theology
I’m expert on loyalty

41
To church and state
And tooth paste

I’m expert on
The soon to be dead
Dying a death
They never died before.

I’m expert on the hand of a cloud

And man sleeping near Boone pond

Expert on upper air skipping stones

And crow’s shadow over harvest fields of Missouri

I’m expert on unrehearsed thoughts

And broken neck of baby robin
On the shagginess of skunks
And the significant of standing Buddha
With leaves on it’s shoulders

I’m the expert witness

On cats and catholic boys

On Central City‘s rain soaked coffins

On limestone’s effect on the Kankakee
On the effect of magazine ad
On the housewife while she is doing laundry

I’m the director of scientific knowledge

Without vision.
I’m the testimony of separation.
Segregation and insemination
Expert on shoe size, on the personality of perfume
And brown angels who will tease your throat to sing.

I’m expert on the thickness of sawing thread

Expert on the frequency of sensual thoughts
During the fourth year of celibacy

I’m a testimony of masturbation

Expert on training the penis to lie down.

I’m expert sexual in do windows

Expert on sensual outer clothing.

42
Expert on blow job
Politician of snow job.

I'm the expert witness

Witnessing to all
Expert on accident reconstruction and juvenile violence
On vocational evauation and rehabilitation
On occupational physician and medical toxicologist
On geochemistry and forensics foreskin of psychologist.

I'm the expert witness witnessing to all

Going on beneath the dine size moon

Voodoo Won’t Work

Not if I sprinkled dried powder heart of

Humming bird on his sleeping body
Would that man love me
Not if I slept with his tobacco-colored hair
Under my pillow and rubbed love oil in my right hand
And still kept pieces of wood in my pocket
Would that man love me
Not nine ribbons blue or red tied in a bag
Calling his name with each fold not nine bags hidden
Under a rug or behind a door
Would that man love me
Not poetry sung between full moon and his bedroom window
Not me masquerading as his lover
Not Pepsi, cigarettes, crest or calling his long distance.

43
Certain Gestures Holding Pure Forms

Certain gestures holding pure forms

Profess the most feared demon of the corn.
Earthy spirits from a woman’s occasion;
One victim of the misfortune labor
Gives birth of Gods and justice born
To the chill of midwinter Christmas morn.
Come my saints and demons dear
Hear the jeering of the ass’ ear
For drama be where heaven lay its temporary
Judgment till that day when nothing
But the aspect of father and son’s evidence,
Warrants earth destruction for kingdom to come.
Take no Gods who will not dance,
Will not drag your heat through the streets
Then collect it in their hands to eat.
Come, let us arrive to that animal that we are;
Ashes of goodness and evil’s bones
Come, driven to church courtyard door where day
Break on night sharp edge and spill itself across earth’s head
And there let us praise with dance this light that
Gives more then even Gods have dreamed to comprehend.

44
A St. Louis Tale

Old man, old man

Cussing on the street
To an old woman
About the money for the meat

Old man, old man

Knocked the woman down
She hit him back so hard
That he start to spin around

Old man, old man

Just wont let it end
He hit the woman back
And she spent him around again

Old man, old man

Never gone to stop-
She pulled a knife
Sliced him once
There the old man dropped

Old man, old man

Nothing do he say
Three-hundred fifty bucks
For the plot where he lay

Old woman, old woman

Sent off to jail
She was to slow inside
That she caught a lot of hell

Old woman, old woman

Finally made parole
She bought a spoon, rented a room
Just above the store

Old woman, old woman

Had a midnight fright
A youngest from the neighborhood
Broke her with his knife.

45
The Glen Black
for Glen

I want to be the blackest person on earth

Black enough that stars take up resident in me
Black enough that black birds wantna mate with me
Black enough that the alphabet of life began with the letter B
Black enough that black boy is the beginning of all belonging
That black girl means the heavenly birth of the world.
I want people to look at me and say
He’s black, he’s black, he’s black damn he’s black
And still not get to the blackness of me
I want to be blacker that grey black
Blue black, blacker then black tinted with black
So black that all things darken in my present
I want to be Blacker then night caught inside my shoes
I want to walk black, sleep black, eat black
Dream black dreams as to push
Earth into eternal darkness
I want to look black, see black, think black back
To the dawning of time
So black that light is ashamed it was ever born
I want to be black enough that moon ask sun for a tan
And men take to their fashion an overcoat
Of raven feathers
I want to be Black enough to make crow’s feathers
The monetary standard of the world
And lord dear lord I want to be black enough to
Know that I am black enough to be as black as I am.

Why I Want to Have Sex with Poets

Their hands knows the moment of a million sound

…Words fall hard to shatter, recollect into some other,
Hubble bubble words hover above the scent of an emotion

Their tongues transverse hidden lands

46
…Short leaf pine, rough bark of cinnamon red scales,
Dark-blue green needles devise against the
Evanescence blue evening of tonguesville

Their breath smells of the alphabet

…Ox water Alpha and beta before gamma,
Damp or fluent as lambda, flesh coffins
Hissing young grass after taste of decompose tress.

Their eyes see what other ignore

…Our minds blacken by its own shadow
Enclosed as the acorn of over cup oak
As sycamore ball borne on the bone of our spine

They will bear witness to their own thoughts

…If everything could be said there will still remain
A handful of words; flocks of captured blackbirds
Endless circling for a way out

They come to except earth’s simple truth

…Earth produce no waste of stone, water, bark, flesh
Or bones. All is consumed, consummation of ones own
Importance, death impregnate life eternal.

They freely give it to you

…Man eat air eternal, a shared plate
Drinks from the same earthen bowl,
Spilling our water with water of all that flows.

They are spies of the Gods

…Knowing of what going on
Beneath the dine size flowering moon, perplex
Expression looking down on St. Louis.

They ware a simplistic cover

…No return from nature, no separation but
Imagined superiority
Shows extent of human ignorance.

They are earth centered

…Earnest earth owns nothing but itself.
In sleep we breathe as earth breathes innate

47
Life is whole owning to itself alone.

They masquerade
…As mesquites, cat, as moon, as jay, as tress
As transmitter and antenna insects, as banjo
Or lyre, as micro cosmic vision focused on an eye.
Man for woman each for the other pleading.

They are forever examining, poking eyes into emotion

…See Aluriste and Antler, Patchen and Poe
William and Whitman, Ginse and Gun, Vorhes and Emily
Rys and Bye, Delgado and Lorca, Hughes and Hayden and Kent Johnson’s eye
Translating Nicaragua poetry

Poetry is emotional
…There is no shelter from the confusing
Emotional weather that governs
The landscape of our mental garden

The Short of it

1
There are few things as
Refreshing as sleep
Fewer still as being
Awake in the hypnotic
Sleep of poetry.

48
2
Johnny didn’t come to school today
His sister says he’s sick
During the night while he slept
A roach crawled into his ear.

3
I’m so poor that
I don’t even have rats
And aint no sense’n me
Making a blessin’ out-of-da.

4
For forty days
And forty nights
The fetus was held in red
Till long cool forceps hands
Reached in and squeezed it dead.

5
Snow have melted
Save for in the shadows
I linger
Memories of you.

An Atomic Explosion

An atomic explosion
Is strictly extraordinary
Destroy the air
In the lungs
A hum of dying there
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmy

49
Country come try the tree aflame
I cry for thee where
Crying brands me as a sissy
I see a thought a boil.
Boys to soon before the noon
Of their lives loose
The cry, a hum inside their eyes
A sea a boil
Socially forbid to flow
Soon explode.

I’ve gotten to the Point in My Life

I’ve gotten to the point in my life

Where there must come a change
Away with Three Musketeers
Give me the no sugar, no hydrogenated fat
I’ll have a high performance fudge bar with bean spouts
I’ll take vitamins A C E B1 B2 B6 B 12
Zinc and potassium too.
I’ll buy two green peace Save the Whales tee-shirts.
I’ll write no-nuke graffiti on Milwaukee’s new
Blue glass federal building in white spray paint
From an air pump recyclable aluminum can.

50
I’ll become homo after trying bi, and love
Naturally on my futon cotton bedding,
My earth shoes parked obediently beside.
I’ll give up meat for tofu and grove on Holly Near
While I apply for Co-Op Life America Health Insurance
I’ll subscribe to In These Times and Mother Jones
I’ll take courses at New College in San Francisco
Or Naropa Institute.
I’ll. Build my own solar dome home in Boulder Colorado,
Make my own desk where I’ll keep Remembrance of Things Past
Both volumes open in different rooms.
I’ll learn meditation from Trungpa and poetry
From Ginsberg.
I’ll find out where the hell is Rocky Flat
And go lay myself on the tracks then go see Dr. Rose my chiropractor.

Black Attack

Man invent Gods

To hypnotize
Man invent Gods to testify
Man invent Gods
To synchronize the truth and the human lie
Bring those black folks on
Tell’em to leave their own damn Gods at home
We got one, JC, as landlord of Americas
He’s an absentee but,
Never mind that
Black folks gonna make Him their own.
White man done Jesus me this, Jesus me that
Jesus me into a black attack.
O Jesus black folks gonna make you their own.
Bring those nigger on
Tell ‘em to leave their own names at home
We got one, nigger
They gonna make it their own
O nigger, black folk gonna make you their own
Come on everybody clap your hands
Say I’m niggerist nigger in a nigger land
Come on everybody clap your hands.

51
Black folks done nigger me this nigger me that
Nigger me into having a black attack.

In Such an Age as this

In such an age as this

When some of us take
Caution against the careless
Tongue that caresses
The unnamed prick,
Where bush queen to
Their cock press passion
Give reckless abandon
In the spruce shadow thick
Night of Cheesman Park
Where the headlights of roaming cars
Hunt the dark for boys and men alike
Alight as I and Whitman
In ways more then our art
And you too Langston.
In such an age as this
Some of my brothers grown bone thin
With this disease that conquered their
Bodies and the passion of their friends,
In such an age the black bird still
Flies; a spot of night in daylight,
Squirrels waken from their
Tress-top sleep look down upon
Hands that grope and lips that mold
Themselves to another’s tongue.
In such an age in light casted across
The street or in moonlight
I see zipper that sparkle under
Low hanging branches of trees
I hear twigs crack,

52
Last season’s leaves crumple
And pine cones accidentally kicked
I hear a low and soft moans.
At this moment should I question
Why I am here?
Is it a passion in the heart,
A need for hands other then mine
To smooth the wrinkles of my fore skin,
Or is it just a sport?

En Las Tardes

En las tardes
Brown children bailan
With their bellies full
Of tortilla and frejois

En la noche
The barrio dreams
Of better thing
Then daylight has shown.

El calor del sol

Turned righteous folks
Brown or deeper
Sweet honey prieta.

53
In the Negro Quarters

In the negro quarters

Of Laurel Mississippi
Big mamas and granddads
Of the southern homeland
Are wakening up to walk in fear
Into the light of day
Leaning on canes
Or walking weapon sticks
Pass frogs croaking
In the wild grass
They walk with weary eyes against
Their oppressors, who comes
To steal social security checks,
To jump them in the cool shadows
Of yellow pine
They come bold, full of zest
These strong young renegades
Come single, couple or raiding packs of four
Carrying sticks, knife or small guns
These crusade warriors with tight muscle armor
These keen eyed oppressor who will
Break brittle bones
These beat box black men to long idle
Under the Mississippi sun.

54
For Anne Waldman and Reed Bye

Last summer Anne wore

A growing full moon
Beneath her cotton clothing
This winter the man once inside
Smiles in the sunlight
Wrapped up tight
He sometimes cries as papa Reed Bye
Talks of Pound and Dr. William.
For the moment baby Edwin
Is more interesting.

Angel of My Desiring

I wake to find you raining in your face

55
Our bedroom have known many storms
The maple outside kisses the window
Your thorns puncture the pillow
Why do you cry when the spirit of drought
Is in the wisdom land?
Black bellies swell, the rivers are dried
And ravens do not feed he who will be the next king.
You ware your love as a child in your belly
Your body is lean as a man in need of his water
In need of bread
I shall gather some sticks to fashion your wings
With oil from my skin will I smooth your prays
My sins remember will I hang in your hair
Go, show yourself in the wisdom land
Strike rain from the God‘s cheeks
The hidden prophets lay in wait beneath
The sand they wake in the sounding of your feet
Your lean body is leasing to the eye
But I have drunken my fill
And time will come to drink again
Go, show yourself in the wisdom land
Where pain holds its counsel
I shall bake you two cakes of mud and grass
To eat and give back to the land.

A Love Poem

We at the dinner table

It isn’t much but to our liking
You play footsy and smile
Between chews
I wink, you flip a pea
Off my spoon.

56
A Brush with Papa Death

Death brushed
Against my side
Squeezed my flesh and found it thin
Touching, stroking, holding to tight
Leaving two broken and one cracked rib
It kissed and took five sounds of breath
It sucked till it bruised my lower lip
Caressing my head it cut the skin
Then licked the blood above my eye
Then kicked that eye with a bit of glass
All in a brush toward someone else.

57
Fragment and Reconstruction from the book of Rys

My brother gave me toys

Of orchard that was tacky
Gave them to me because
The source of his children
Was bricked in silence.
And when I was as heavy in corns
I did snigger for hours yet,
Had to flee to my secret harbor
That ever be oil of ebony.

Behind the history of the blessed retribution

The master of his children, shingled and slaughter
Gave death’s fragrance to ware in my skin
Then he pushed me into the light’s rim
Where I became ashes and gravies catching
To the rusted grave of dead metal.

58
Friends are Fattening Themselves

Friends are fattening themselves

On bundles of sticks
At a reclusive seaport
In heaven,
Where maple skin guys
Loosely sewed between
Jet black garment trick
Their locked hips to spacious wings
Beneath the holy, holy tree of the
Understood word.
They shake away their wings
To hear that you have evicted young Satan;
That fine historical bird
First revolutionist of the winged set.

The Smell of Death

Flies knows
On the battlefield
Where the dead men lay

59
-buzz –buzz round their ears
Land lightly on their faces
What do you hear from
The dying men’s throats
Rattle rattle death’s rattle roll
-buzz –buzz round their eyes
What do you see, their lives
-buzz buzz round their noses
What do you smell
The smell of death that drew you there.

I Went Away from Uijonbu

I went away from Uijonbu,

From Inchon stretching its rocky legs
Smooth and snippy and algae covered into the Yellow Sea.
Went away from Seoul, packed fitfully around
The mountainside of the morning calm,
Away from rice paddies like
Square blue sheets of skies surrounding inlayed villages,
Near summer harvest the thick growth of skies
Bends slender green, a sea.
I went away from Taejon, Taegu and, Pusan,
From Cheju-Do’s white sand that turns blue water emerald.
From Sinhyo-ri where red pepper dries on tin roofs
Of hooches,
Away from clam shells that once held the promise of pearls

60
Littering the shore alone side bleached fish skeletons,
The later, their ribs like white ferns growing from the rocks.
I went away from the pungent air of orange groves
And air of the fat belly pheasant’s cries,
Went away from the other side of this island where
My feet ashed over with the dried salt of the sea cringed the sand.
I have come up here where sky and land fused grey
And the surface of this road that leads to Hallo-san crater
Crack, gives way, pulls my weight knee-deep in each steps
Toward the place where winter keeps its strong-hold
Foggy around the sitting Buddha.
Flakes drifts about this dark grey mediating stone
In a silence broken only by the thin air burning of my breath.
Reaching to touch on Buddha’s belly a crescent of snow
Like body-ash on the bellies of kids in Ethiopia-
Their eyes, large as wooden statuettes of primitive Gods.
Flies buzz about their dark flesh in the noise of mating
Broken only by the cold sting of stone to my hand.

Gertrude Stein N Mind

And how now ms. Stein

Have you come to be
So big or should I say
Rotund or wide about
The hips and those
Parts above and below
And below the above there
And how too or also
So I should ask this
Second question of you
Ms. Stein
So stout and steady
To study you instance
Standing among yellow
Grass where there
Now ms. Stein a pint full

61
I would say
Did you ever see a
Steinbok grazing in and out
Of haze on some east Africa plain
Or four saints with colored-
Negro-black- afro-
African American Inez wild
In the Houseman’s house
Well Welles we know Orson
But wild is wild on my tongue Ms. Stein
De ma lanque langsyne
I sang on the deck of the Hannibal
O Ms. Stein choses je sonde je sonde Cèsaire
My body lost without the
Songs of my tongue
Song of ostrich eggs
Gold dust and ten tongue
As black as mine Ms. Stein.

A Place in Your Heart

A place in your heart

Is all that I ask
For you to pause here
And hear the sound of my breath

62
If Ten Thousand People

If ten thousand people

Love ten thousand people
And double that number loved more
It wouldn’t be long before
We brought heaven down
From its sun side couch
Where Gods watch
Us as we watch TV
Unable to intervene
They presume it’s we who write
The scripts of earth
And we presume it’s they
Neither willing to own up
To the laugh track behind
This human play.

The Promised Land

63
The Promised Land
From where I sleep
Is a mighty fine place indeed
With trees on the streets
Its hot water during the summer
And ac too, an ice box
Full of good healthy food
Its decent wiring though out the house
Room where a body can just move about.
In the Promised Land
Black folks knows equity
Mexicans comes up north first class
And Los Coaster, if they wish
Wear feathers in their hair
It’s a land where a woman can
Look her look and not starve it thin
Where homeless is a thing that hangs in a museum
O, yes the Promised Land
Is a mighty fine place indeed
But what use such a place
If’n it can’t escape my place of dreams?

I Slipped on a Dream

I slipped on a dream
That you left on the floor,
Slipped and broke my words.
In the commotion
A hour was broken
Till time went back to bed.
With a fancy Spanish knife
I cut open your darkness
To see if light would shine,
Out flowed a thousand words

64
In search of an immortal design.
O you are the love of my lover,
You are the dream that I would murder
In my murderous dream to discover
What I keep secret in my head.
You are the dead poems unread
Our abode is but a bed
Where in lies the unspoken word.

I Keep Dropin’ My Gs

I keep dropin’ my Gs
Somethin’ pleasin’ there
Somethin’ thin, ancient
Dunbar drops more
Then me
Fu ta mak his meanin’
Da lawd tho be catchin’
Wa I say I mean
We the dark G droppers
We a people to speak so bold
While there are some who
Their Rs rolls
Know me by my speech
Bred into me
Since my days of young
Bigmama taught me so.
Childhood in back water Mississippi
Down on Bigmama’s farm
Just out side of Macon among
The yellow pines

65
Farm land in the family
From ways back slavery times

By a Deep Design

By a deep design
Do the world goes on,
Life for life sake
Seem to be the rule.
When I wake I can see
That in life
There is more
To be concern with
Then me.
Earth is a garden of many things
Lest among them man.
She nurture each in their stand;
Rain she gives to the flower,
The flower she gives
To the bees.
By the sun are counted the hour.
The streams she gives to the rivers
The rivers she gives to the sea.
But man thinks that all is given to he
Foolish, foolish man
When will you learn
That you are one within the whole?
No more, no less important
As time goes.
You are not the strongest,
Your eyes are not
The keenest, you nose
Not the best of all the beasts,
In running you are weak.
Know your place

66
And keep to it well
Less you turn earth
Into a living hell.
Mark this as being told
You can not defeat the whole.
Get to close
And she will turn on you
And leave all others
To jointly rule.

Canto for Edgar Allan Poe (1)

Let what winds

Will what blows

67
Over sea or land o’er
Where man stand
Looking for his
Forgotten God
Who will a cloud
Of heavenly fire
Descend down
To woo you and your kin.
If perchance it let you in
Its heart of stature gold
That Moses did not know.
I pose as priest yes I pose
To be a dream within a dream
And deem to slay the forgotten day
No less gone far too soon.
It is now the noon of our lives
Try as much as man shall try
The vision remains the same
Amid the roar of wind swept shore
And golden sand that
Slips through the hand
To tell a time fit for rhyme.
The day does creep
The cloud does weep
And deep within all hopes
Fall as grains for to small
To be the composition of man..
None is more none
Then we can stand
To mold our God by
Man’s mind and hands
Carved in wood the mask
That binds the face
To the warer.
Roar, roar O tormented soul
The waves shall bare you aloft
And I the priest of all your days
Shall woo you to the grave.
-

Canto for Edgar Allan Poe (2)

When you make up your mind

And find the fine command

68
That once was grand by
The precept of man
Who woo the doom of earth
By machines of war
Then that Lord of love
Shall fall from above
And spite all concerned
Shall ring the knell
That tells the ruling angels
Decked in jewels grand
With satin wings and
Africa hair makes their vows
To stand by their man
And assure no more
The fleshy core that
Makes a man a man.
None-the-less with what
Was spoken I am at peace
With my reverie
That I keep safe
From the church-yard door
Thinking the happy dead
Will sigh and swell
The bosom composed
Of words stolen from
A poem that none knows.
O go yes, go your way
With mind made of broken
Thoughts the last token
Of all your doubts.
-

Canto for Edgar Allen Poe (3)

Death do not come for me

I fain not to know your

69
Restful peace.
Do not come from your throne
Leave me truly as one alone.
Let not life’s light go dim
For what I hold worst
I hold best to keep dear
The life within my breast.
Take not away my last breath
Lead me not to my eternal rest.
I trouble no melancholy waters
I love no holy heaven come to town.
Let me stay and not lie down
Or drawn in a sea lurid and rough
And silent by the waves as they must
That stays hugging the shores
Free from the pinnacles
Of spires and domes.
I make of my heart
A church of songs
Yes, yes in deed
Do not come for me.

Canto for Edgar Allan Poe (4)

If to myself I can be true

I fain that I am not in love with you.

70
I named the night that we first met
And ultimate truth fled my rest.
And sublime wisdom does its best
To step me out of time and space
And Titan floods the holy gate.
Wait; yes wait you now long dead
Who ills my will and overspread
The chilly lake where lilies grows.
The human cold of murmuring snow.
When spring beams its warmth
White robed the nook the travelers keep
And like some fallen angel I weep
Melancholy for all my friends
Taken by AIDS they grown bone thin
And spotted ill the disease encamped
In their breast once ghouls thrilled
The unholy spots ring their skin
And derange their minds
Till they loose track of time.
Friends gone to soon into the
Hell’s fire of pools aghast they
Meet their memories spent.
I sigh for them yes I weep
Sheets of rivers mean to peace
The restlessness that I seek
The chilly rim surging
From the sad sea.
The grey wood dark and cold
Enfold all my living hopes
And the dead are lonely in their
Heavenly clothe clothed by
The hand of the only God
Who swamp his shrouded form
With memory of the last fall
From the golden cross.

71