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Somebody go & ask Biggie to orate what's going down in the streets. No, an attitude is not a suicide note written on walls around the streets. Twitter stays lockstep in the frontal lobe as we hope for a bypass beyond the streets, but only each day bears witness in the echo chamber of the streets. Grandmaster Flash's thunderclap says he's not the grand jury in the streets, says he doesn't care if you're big or small fear can kill a man on the streets. Take back the night. Take killjoy's cameras & microphones to the streets. If you're holding the hand lightning strikes juice will light you up miles from the streets where an electric chair surge dims all the county lights beyond the streets. Who will go out there & speak laws of motion & relativity in the streets? Yusef, this morning proves a crow the only truth serum in the street.

beverly be the only south side you don’t fit in everybody in your neighborhood color of white hen brown bag tupperware lunch don’t fill you after school cross the street, count quarters with white friends you love 25¢ zebra cakes mom would never let you eat you learn to white lie through white teeth at white hen oreos in your palm, perm in your hair everyone’s irish in beverly, you just missin’ the white skin pray they don’t notice your burnt toast, unwondered bread you be the brownest egg ever born from the white hen pantry in your chest where you stuff all the Black in distract from the syllables in your name with a white grin keep your consonants crisp, coffee milked, hands visible never touch the holiday-painted windows of white hen you made that mistake, scratched your initials in the paint an unmarked crown victoria pulled up, full of white men they grabbed your wrist & wouldn’t show you a badge the manager clucked behind the counter, thick as a white hen they told your friends to run home, but called the principal on you & you learned Black sins cost much more than white ones

Followed by his lodge, shabby men stumbling over the cobblestones, and his children, faces red and ugly with tears, eyes and eyelids red, in the black coffin in the black hearse the old man. No longer secretly grieving that his children are not strong enough to go the way he wanted to go and was not strong enough.

At first you didn’t know me. I was a shape moving rapidly, nervous at the edge of your vision. A flat, high voice, dark slash of hair across my cheekbone. I made myself present, though never distinct. Things I said that he repeated, a tone you could hear, but never trace, in his voice. Silence—followed by talk of other things. When you would sit at your desk, I would creep near you like a question. A thought would scurry across the front of your mind. I’d be there, ducking out of sight. You must have felt me watching you, my small eyes fixed on your face, the smile you wondered at, on the lips only. The voice on the phone, quick and full of business. All that you saw and heard and could not find the center of, those days growing into years, growing inside of you, out of reach, now with you forever, in your house, in your garden, in corridors of dream where I finally tell you my name.

You ignore the way light filters through my cells, the way I have of fading out—still there is a constant tug, a stretching, what is left of me is coming loose. Soon, I will be only crumbs of popcorn, a blue ring in the tub, an empty toilet paper roll, black mold misted on old sponges, strands of hair woven into carpet, a warped door that won’t open, the soft spot in an avocado, celery, a pear, a metallic taste in the beer, a cold sore on your lip—and when I finally lose my hold you will hear a rustle and watch me spill grains of rice across the cracked tile.

Two hundred seventy Ghost Dancers died dreaming That humanity would drown In a flood of White sins. Then the renewed earth Would reclaim city and town, Leaving only Ghost Dancers And those who lived by nature’s laws. History books say the threat is gone. The Ghost Dance died with the ancestors— Wovoka and his sacred dream Were destroyed. Each time it rains, I go out to the sidewalk, Where the tree roots Have broken the concrete Listening to the water’s whispering: “It is coming soon.”

— Gaetano Donizetti, “Lucia di Lammermoor” Be remote A while from malice and from murdering. — Gwendolyn Brooks water this fountain where I am yoked sun-break he holds you how once I this secret dark dagger my body rip off the collar your cage don’t wait my neck his breath these woods this water my waist his ring his grip blood sister

Basilica of San Zeno Maggiore, Verona A chubby fist and wing float free, severed from the landscape of human affairs. Below, a barefoot saint seems to straddle acres, beaming casual self-possession, the divine right to stake eternal claim—but in the space between both legs, a third intrudes, last remnant of a man fading to white dust. Nine hundred years ago this wall was his. Reduced to a toehold, he now spites the fourteenth-century arriviste, holding his ground with the ghost of what he was. The saint remains oblivious. Centuries sweep around him like planets' rings; the church's wheel-of-fortune spins rose light through plague and war. Yet so vivid are his blue and russet robes, he glistens—a refugee from a sun shower who's arrived dripping wet, an idea fresh from the brush of his maker.

Lit from within is the sole secure way to traverse dark matter. Some life forms — certain mushrooms, snails, jellyfish, worms — glow bioluminescent, and people as well; we emit infrared light from our most lucent selves. Our tragedy is we can’t see it. We see by reflection. We need biofluorescence to show our true colors. External illumination can distort, though. When gravity bends light, huge galaxy clusters can act as telescopes, elongating background images of star systems to faint arcs — a lensing effect like viewing distant street lamps through a glass of wine. A glass of wine or two now makes me weave as if acting a drunkard’s part; as if, besotted with unrequited love for the dynamic Turner canvases spied out by the Hubble, I could lurch down a city street set without provoking every pedestrian walk-on stare. Stare as long as you need to. If you think about it, walking, even standing, is illogical — such tiny things, feet! — especially when one’s body is not al dente anymore. Besides, creature of extremes and excess, I’ve always thought Apollo beautiful but boring, a bit of a dumb blonde. Dionysians don’t do balance. Balance, in other words, has never been my strong point. But I digress. More and more these days, digression seems the most direct route through from where I’ve lost or found myself out of place, mind, turn, time. Place your foot just so, mind how you turn: too swift a swivel can bring you down. Take your time ushering the audience out, saying goodbye to the actors. The ghost light is what they call the single bulb hanging above the bare stage in an empty theater. In the empty theater of such a night, waking to meet no external radiance, this is the final struggle left to win, this the sole beacon to beckon the darkness in and let the rest begin, this the lens through which at last to see both Self and Other arrayed with the bright stain of original sin: lit from within.

He reads:What soul suffers in secret, the flesh shows openly. Deep within, in a region hardly accessible, a bold self-image sends messages of bloodshed and conquest, which reverberate in his heart of hearts. [I forget which hand is writing.] He does not doubt that he exists. The five senses have left their mark on him. It is a record of what has happened to him, but he cannot talk or travel until he finds a body of water. A man who has lived on reindeer’s flesh amuses himself with ripples. In this cage was once a nightingale. In the echo, new words for wind. The usual convulsions,and a green cat. And, after all, months or years are nothing to him. [My image contains his body.] His body contains bodies. Blemishes. Inglories. Vague figures, in a howling wind, and with no notion of perspective. Of countless ruined worlds, he would appropriate the essential emblem. Wall struggling with wall, shadow with shad- ow. Thousands of miles a day. He gazes across an unguarded cemetery—gazes idly, waiting for new equipment. As through a fixed window, he finds a kind of space, the visible world foreshortened. He does not see deeply, but—still—one thing behind another. He keeps a tiny bird, folded like a sheet of paper. Twice two is four—still—and a circle has no angles. Body sheds shoulder, jaw.However body may appear, the soul comes back in scars. [There are no dead. Only names.] Too close, ruin wrinkles the surface—his breath bothers reality. The sun pours down. The pots are mended. An unfolding, from where it is all contained. The ships have been salvaged. [I do not know what body he has in mind.] Clothing is resumed. Temples are rebuilt. “Which body?” we inquire, while all the liars cry out, “Verily!” As though all this were in the dark. Here is a column of soldiers, a heap of apples, an avenue of trees. Here a swarm of bees, of birds, a row of equidistant lines. A set of unequal objects distributes the field of vision. Here is the painted world in an actual image. [I have no theory for the clouds he sees.]