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Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations I started Early – Took my Dog – And visited the Sea – The Mermaids in the Basement Basement i.e., the bottom of the ocean Came out to look at me – And Frigates Frigates fast and highly maneuverable warships of the 18th and 19th centuries, used to escort other larger ships, or to patrol the coast and blockade harbors – in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen Hands Hempen Hands strong, thick ropes made of hemp, used on ships – Presuming Me to be a Mouse – Aground – opon opon upon the Sands – But no Man moved Me – till the Tide Went past my simple Shoe – And past my Apron – and my Belt And past my Boddice Boddice bodice; an upper part of a woman’s dress, or a rigid, laced corset worn underneath clothing, covering the upper part of a woman’s body – too – And made as He would eat me up – As wholly as a Dew Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve – And then – I started – too – And He – He followed – close behind – I felt His Silver Heel Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes Would overflow with Pearl – Until We met the Solid Town – No One He seemed to know – And bowing – with a Mighty look – At me – The Sea withdrew –

I don’t know. I still can’t get it right, the way those dirt roads cut across the flats and led to shacks where hounds and muddy shoats skulked roundabouts. Describing it sounds trite as hell, the good old South I love to hate. The truth? What’s that? How should I know? I stayed inside too much. I learned to boast of stupid things. I kept my ears shut tight, as we kept doors locked, windows locked, the curtains drawn. Now I know why. The dark could hide things from us. Dark could see what we could not. Sometimes those dirt roads shocked me, where they ended up: I watched a dog die in the ditch. The man who shot him winked at me.

Detective Hardwood looks like Batman this morning pouty cupidy mouth and a lot of black sculptural clanking the statuary in my mortuary, the Masonic Hall having burned again in dreams but everyone still keeps skipping towards it it's a hollow a round shell my life as the shape of the ways I've been fucked by prevailing thought & practice all the conscious and unconscious sexisms selfishnesses affluences assumptions suppressions in drift GET   RID   OF   ALL   CONTROLS—is what the Soul keeps screaming. ____________________ I look up someone grins you're a bloody feral wolf-face I like you. ____________________ I sleep-walked in a dream to a man's apartment— a man I'm doing business with— I forgot, but how could I? how I'd gotten there, and when I die will I remember all such forgotten things GET   RID   OF   THE   CONTROLS I want to remember now. I apologized to the man for not adhering to office hours it was four a.m. Office hours are better he said. Don't arrive anywhere in your sleep don't mix up night and day soul and detective. No. ____________________ There must be so much to reclaim because I'm so limited ____________________ this. They broke your day they fought it you forgot how advantageous to be fit with god and not see eye you forgot gold sun brilliant in this story go in conscious. ____________________ That queen that Assyrian woman was so cruel and that never occurred to her ... but those eyes saw raw smells and gods everywhere dusty this dust I was truly assembled from at least as you, we are communally such. If you say you'll hurt me, do you really mean me I can't be, can I, hurt? ____________________ “Hut Sut Tut Mut there's gonna be a wedding” I dream that's a song. Wake up with, in my head, “They say don't go on Wolverton Moun-tain” (“Her tender lips/are sweeter than hone-y” ____________________ Later. I have a drop of blood on a front tooth I kind of don't mind— This the list of what we've done: It was different structure we killed it put beasts in the refrigerator and that was almost as bad as my own enslavement. Then I saw Christ's blood pumped into a rejuvenating mummy. This great sickness we're part of apple clot and can you really chew it detective Oh sure I can, I'm Robert Mitch-ham. ____________________ you've broke your own sto I'm sort of hysterical the E is it for hope, cutting the E might be for Hope Nope and bloody, the bloodiest is Hope. Where are the E's of exactness? E is my middle name

after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to study stars. “I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium...So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. & all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance...Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna...I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is the [thing] along the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.” —NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007 Body of space. Body of dark. Body of light. The Skyview apartments circa 1973, a boy is kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who (it is important to mention here his skin is brown) prepares his telescope, the weights & rods, to better see the moon. His neighbor (it is important to mention here that she is white) calls the police because she suspects the brown boy of something, she does not know what at first, then turns, with her looking, his telescope into a gun, his duffel into a bag of objects thieved from the neighbors’ houses (maybe even hers) & the police (it is important to mention that statistically they are also white) arrive to find the boy who has been turned, by now, into “the suspect,” on the roof with a long, black lens, which is, in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon & depending on who you are, reading this, you know that the boy is in grave danger, & you might have known somewhere quiet in your gut, you might have worried for him in the white space between lines 5 & 6, or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding your breath for him right now because you know this story, it’s a true story, though, miraculously, in this version of the story, anyway, the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives to tell the police that he is studying the night & moon & lives long enough to offer them (the cops) a view through his telescope’s long, black eye, which, if I am spelling it out anyway, is the instrument he borrowed & the beautiful “trouble” he went through lugging it up to the roof to better see the leopard body of space speckled with stars & the moon far off, much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing out) the distance between the white neighbor who cannot see the boy who is her neighbor, who, in fact, is much nearer to her than to the moon, the boy who wants to understand the large & gloriously un-human mysteries of the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,” has not been killed by the murderous jury of his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof. This boy on the roof of this poem with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body as I write this poem my body is making a boy even as the radio calls out the Missouri coroner’s news, the Ohio coroner’s news. 2015. My boy will nod for his milk & close his mouth around the black eye of my nipple. We will survive. How did it happen? The boy. The cops. My body in this poem. My milk pulling down into droplets of light as the baby drinks & drinks them down into the body that is his own, see it, splayed & sighing as a star in my arms. Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars. Maybe he will be (say it) the boy on the coroner’s table splayed & spangled by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last. Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning, splendored with breaths, turned, by time, into, at least, this song. This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul” caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net, then, whoosh, back into the sea of space. The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing only things ordinary as water & light.

I think I should have loved you presently, And given in earnest words I flung in jest; And lifted honest eyes for you to see, And caught your hand against my cheek and breast; And all my pretty follies flung aside That won you to me, and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my little wicked ways. I, that had been to you, had you remained, But one more waking from a recurrent dream, Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained, And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme, A ghost in marble of a girl you knew Who would have loved you in a day or two.

I thought of   Donne, and how the pride must war — Of  Manley Hopkins, godlier by far, His filial bemusement death and birth Counting the spots of   God on this, God's earth. And then, asleep, I dreamed of  Henry Ford Wandering beardless down orchestral ways Of  factories. A patriarchal lord, Counting his beads of  praise.

The innocents all dress the same Their mouths open Their mouths close They flush and bleed and wonder where they are Happy to be leaving Hesitant and unprepared for the departure when it comes to them like penicillin Are you pinching yourself? What I want and how I want it That is what they told me They were right Skin is just like fabric All violence is in defense of something I lay on my back and wish I do that now I wish for good things, all the good, good things Why not Fabric rolls out like a cloud of paint A moan into a square of gauze I don’t know and so I write about it I care about life and the ones who never say a thing We are in the hands of providence who is unqualified There are those who would protect us from the possibility of good

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then. Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America.

I TOO have been to Candyland, but I found myself missing the death cult. I missed the spectacle of the wounded bones being opened and instrumented. Bill Varner, when he was still just a boy, wrote a stunning line of Arabic verse. He wrote: “The crescent moon is a scimitar; the sun, a severed head.” ¡Gran cantar! and this, when he still had to keep his books in a locker! And he’d never even held hands with a girl—God! Penn State in the 1980s! In those days, we all sat at the feet of a pig poet, deaf in one ear. One of these Dreadful “white-haired lovers”—oh, but he knew how to touch fire to fuse! That little stick of fire apt to launch a poetic career! But what is it now? Merely a billowing cloud of humidity floating out of a tree. Every turtle, snake, and bird is “born again”—oh, isn’t that so? The first time, Out the fêted cloaca—and the next, through the top of the shell. The “I” is Greek, the “it” Italian, and Dickinson is our Ghalib. But that Ridiculous piece of dirt you’re kissing on can never be anything but. Shut your eyes to what a worm he is, concentrate on his caress—but know Every half-truth is bound to call up its suppressed synoptic double. Close your eyes and moan softly, your head full of packed cotton—but know Every hidden camera’s cockpit must one day be delivered of its black box.

I travelled among unknown men, In lands beyond the sea; Nor, England! did I know till then What love I bore to thee. 'Tis past, that melancholy dream! Nor will I quit thy shore A second time; for still I seem To love thee more and more. Among thy mountains did I feel The joy of my desire; And she I cherished turned her wheel Beside an English fire. Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, The bowers where Lucy played; And thine too is the last green field That Lucy's eyes surveyed.