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If Cynthia be a queen, a princess, and supreme, Keep these among the rest, or say it was a dream, For those that like, expound, and those that loathe express Meanings according as their minds are moved more or less; For writing what thou art, or showing what thou were, Adds to the one disdain, to the other but despair, Thy mind of neither needs, in both seeing it exceeds.

If love now reigned as it hath been And were rewarded as it hath sin, Noble men then would sure ensearch All ways whereby they might it reach, But envy reigneth with such disdain And causeth lovers outwardly to refrain, Which puts them to more and more Inwardly most grievous and sore. The fault in whom I cannot set, But let them tell which love doth get— To lovers I put now sure this case: Which of their loves doth get them grace? And unto them which doth it know Better than do I, I think it so.

What none knows is when, not if. Now that your life nears its end when you turn back what you see is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No, it is a vast resonating chamber in which each thing you say or do is new, but the same.What none knows is how to change. Each plateau you reach, if single, limited, only itself, in- cludes traces of  all the others, so that in the end limitation frees you, there is no end, if   you once see what is there to see. You cannot see what is there to see — not when she whose love you failed is standing next to you. Then, as if refusing the know- ledge that life unseparated from her is death, as if again scorning your refusals, she turns away. The end achieved by the unappeased is burial within. Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see by what necessity the double-bind is in the end the  figure  for human life, why what we love is precluded always by something else we love, as if each no we speak is yes, each yes no. The prospect is mixed but elsewhere the forecast is no better. The eyrie where you perch in exhaustion has food and is out of  the wind, if cold. You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the sea for movement, though the promise of  sex or food is the prospect that bewildered  you to this end. Something in you believes that it is not the end. When you wake, sixth grade will start. The finite you know you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is what you should not love, which endless bullies in- tuit unerringly. The future will be different: you cannot see the end. What none knows is when, not if.

If  you’re crowish and you know it give a caw Caaaw If  you’re weighted and you bear it send a moo Moooo If  you’re owl and you dreamed it, give a hoo Hoooo If  you’re thirsty and you mean it breathe an ahhh Ahhhh You are putty in my hands said the wind to the stone said the dawn to the bloom said the dark to the moon.

A gauze bandage wraps the land and is unwound, stained orange with sulfates. A series of slaps molds a mountain, a fear uncoils itself, testing its long cool limbs. A passing cloud seizes up like a carburetor and falls to earth, lies broken- backed and lidless in the scree. Acetylene torches now snug in their holsters, shop-vacs trundled back behind the dawn. A mist becomes a murmur, becomes a moan deepening the dust- choked fissures in the rock O pity us Ignatz O come to us by moonlight O arch your speckled body over the earth.

To imagine a morning the first sounds from the street and the house, its halls scarifying consciousness Antique glass smudges limbs (more blue than green) flared out over a roof To imagine the raw circumference of a field as it wakes what we make of it where our senses send us Gray oscillates gray and the mountain a line lodged within it gone slack at the end No need to mention weather The yard— the measure An unkempt garden bed convulses synchronous with traffic flashing through the fence Stone bench in a ring of weeds Shadows ring— a sound Bees doused in viscous sun, erased

—in memoriam Cheikh Anta Diop, and for John Henrik Clarke, Ivan van Sertima, Adotey Bing, Aida Brako, Vincent Odamtten, and by special request, Esi Doughan and Kinna Likimani. Who was it said the reason why you never see Black Folks properly e-v-e-r on film or TV is ’cause White Folks “find them threatening”? Whopei! Abae-o-o-o! We always thought our beautiful black skin was the Problem. So Afia and Ola Eye-leen, Lola, and Tapu bleached and blotched their skins ugly to please our masters and our masters’ servants. Now don’t come telling me flat noses, thick lips, and small ears must also disappear to put the world at ease? That must explain why the Princess Nefertiti and the youthful King Tut were dragged to Michael Jackson’s beauty doctor long before Young Michael was born, and also why the Sphinx who looked like Great Ancestor King Khafre is being redone! We should have known we were in trouble the day we heard a Corsican general traveled to Giza by way of Paris and a crown to shoot the Sphinx’s nose off for not-at-all-looking like his. Enfin! Helas!! Mon Dieu!!! Ebusuafo, for years the Sphinx stood massive eternal riddled with wisdom and all very thick-lipped very flat-nosed. We never saw him photographed head-on. But in the year 2020 the New Sphinx will be unveiled full visage on view straight nose raised thin lips tight and even, maybe, blue-eyed: a perfect image of the men who vested so much interest in his changing face. You see,Wekumei, when folks figure you are their slave your past belongs to them. And mind you, the Man will try to grab our future too. Shall we let him?

Imagine Lucifer An angel without angelness An apple Plucked clear by will of taste, color, Strength, beauty, roundness, seed Absent of all God painted, present everything An apple is. Imagine Lucifer An angel without angelness A poem That has revised itself out of sound Imagine, rhyme, concordance Absent of all God spoke of, present everything A poem is. The law I say, the Law Is? What is Lucifer An emperor with no clothes No skin, no flesh, no heart An emperor!

From my cell I was staring at a cloud, a dog decaying in the woods, etc., as I took up the long-awaited sequel to my Confessions. By this time my hand was so far away that it looked like a small hairless spider whose progress I could hardly help but follow, from the corner of one eye, as it went on filling page after page in a notebook the size of a stamp with words too small for anyone to read. I looked up and noticed my bars had turned to gold. And before I forget, I’d like to be the first to congratulate everyone who has not committed suicide up until now. Camouflaged and lightless congregation, the world will never know your names, never know of its debt to you, or what you suffered; with what uncomplaining anguish you sacrificed the one thing all hold most dear, most have in common, the sense of being completely different from anybody else—it just vanished at some point, having attained its sexually mature and winged stage. You had a great vision about it, but told no one.We have misnamed death life and life death. You saw another world, and it was precisely the same as this one. This time you told everyone, until someone asked you very nicely to quiet down. And the weather—everything you have heard on that subject is a serious understatement. The scarlet horrors were preparing to file in for my ignominious obsequies, already they swarmed freely over my body. Then, there was no weather. I can’t tell you how perfect that was. As it happens I had been gazing up at the dusk stars, as I can be found doing more or less day and night, for I like to think they are growing younger as I die, come by some time and tell me what you think. Under torture—some atrocious form of tickling, for example—I guess I’d describe myself as a fairly good egg in hot water. Family motto roughly translates,April wizards bring May blizzards. We tend to be apprehended eventually, after a futile but all the more spirited attempt at first degree self-impersonation; however, this is not the time for levity, we happen to be speaking of a serious medical goodnight kiss. Traditionally, we are then detained at a local mental facility known for its celebrated alumni, though in recent decades secret and permanent socialist elements in the government have seen to it that the lowest scum of humanity now appear to have open access to those once hallowed halls smeared with our shit and vomit. What I’m getting at is this: after a relatively brief stay, we are invariably released with some deranged doctor’s or other’s blessing, a mixture of relief and disgust on the part of the staff, and the secret eye-signal that will get you into any movie house in Milwaukee free for the next year. Some of us like to get together once a day, rain or shine, and gather furtively at the picnic grounds under those tall wavering candleflame pines, where neither moth nor rust can reach, nor faintest scream, and exchange ribald tales verging on satanic perversion, each drawing his iridescent injection from the same oceanic martini, very dry, about two tears’ worth of vermouth, in an unremembered dream.

It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade. And I'm grilling, I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped like the state of Pennsylvania. I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure, what's the big difference," as if he's really asking. I put on hamburgers and hot dogs, slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins are fluttering away like lost messages. "You're running around," my mother says, "like a chicken with its head loose." "Ma," I say, "you mean cut off, loose and cut off   being as far apart as, say, son and daughter." She gives me a quizzical look as though I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she says, "Sure," my grandmother pipes in, "you're both our children, so why worry?" That's not the point I begin telling them, and I'm comparing words to fish now, like the ones in the sea at Port Said, or like birds among the date palms by the Nile, unrepentantly elusive, wild. "Sonia," my father says to my mother, "what the hell is he talking about?" "He's on a ball," my mother says. "That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands, "as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...." "And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks, and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says, "let's have some fun," and launches into a polka, twirling my mother around and around like the happiest top, and my uncle is shaking his head, saying "You could grow nuts listening to us," and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai burgeoning without end, pecans in the South, the jumbled flavor of them suddenly in my mouth, wordless, confusing, crowding out everything else.