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Words without much use now. Unable to remake the thing. And I thought what should I think— followed by: spring light looks like feathers. (Birds seemed conveniently decorous.) What then does this leave I asked & was surprised to know so quickly—that my understanding of what the light & birds could not be made to mean would not detract from them as they were. Bound by feathers (a thought, I will admit, born of artifice alone) they bore themselves aloft. What could I counter with? I, who held my heart in offering as much for show as for a fear so deep I found I couldn't name it.

The streets ram themselves into coochies: sodden women with bamboo for backs & taffy for sex.Both sweet & sour. Star-cloaked women who don’t bend or break. Who catch Hondas right in they grills. Women with electric-pink hoofs that drag in the slow churn of the intersection. Clog the sidewalks. Metastasize along the corridor of Main Street. They have come to settle around the bend of this corner. Pose under carnival-like car lights at just nine-thirty. Note:It ain’t even prime time & they got all that good-good going on sale. The gully accordion, their arms sway in & out of tempo with traffic. They stagger in & out of the busted frame of Pop’s Grocery neon-blue open sign. Their smoke-thin throats glitter when they slip into the ringing center of the motel lobby. Strangled light bubbles & soaps along their jaws like melted crayons through the Plexiglas. A rush of shade strains against their nylon-clamped thighs, rides up their hips & dangles around their soft bellies as they saunter on in. They be harvested sounds for the replay later this evening. When they got to make it do what it do. When they got to cash they own checks. Trace dollar signs into ceilings — signals cut with their zirconia-encrusted toes. Giggle & grunt at all the right moments for the Best in Show.

A chimney, breathing a little smoke. The sun, I can't see making a bit of pink I can't quite see in the blue. The pink of five tulips at five p.m. on the day before March first. The green of the tulip stems and leaves like something I can't remember, finding a jack-in-the-pulpit a long time ago and far away. Why it was December then and the sun was on the sea by the temples we'd gone to see. One green wave moved in the violet sea like the UN Building on big evenings, green and wet while the sky turns violet. A few almond trees had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes out of the blue looking pink in the light. A gray hush in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue into the sky. They're just going over the hill. The green leaves of the tulips on my desk like grass light on flesh, and a green-copper steeple and streaks of cloud beginning to glow. I can't get over how it all works in together like a woman who just came to her window and stands there filling it jogging her baby in her arms. She's so far off. Is it the light that makes the baby pink? I can see the little fists and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts. It's getting grayer and gold and chilly. Two dog-size lions face each other at the corners of a roof. It's the yellow dust inside the tulips. It's the shape of a tulip. It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. It's a day like any other.

Winter. Time to eat fat and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat, a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It’s his way of telling whether or not I’m dead. If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am He’ll think of something. He settles on my chest, breathing his breath of burped-up meat and musty sofas, purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat, not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door, declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory, which are what will finish us off in the long run. Some cat owners around here should snip a few testicles. If we wise hominids were sensible, we’d do that too, or eat our young, like sharks. But it’s love that does us in. Over and over again,He shoots, he scores! and famine crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits thirty below, and pollution pours out of our chimneys to keep us warm. February, month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre. I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries with a splash of vinegar. Cat, enough of your greedy whining and your small pink bumhole. Off my face! You’re the life principle, more or less, so get going on a little optimism around here. Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

The cold grows colder, even as the days grow longer, February's mercury vapor light buffing but not defrosting the bone-white ground, crusty and treacherous underfoot. This is the time of year that's apt to put a hammerlock on a healthy appetite, old anxieties back into the night, insomnia and nightmares into play; when things in need of doing go undone and things that can't be undone come to call, muttering recriminations at the door, and buried ambitions rise up through the floor and pin your wriggling shoulders to the wall; and hope's a reptile waiting for the sun.

It is all kind of lovely that I know what I attend here now the maturity of snow has settled around forming a sort of time pushing that other over either horizon and all is mine in any colors to be chosen and everything is cold and nothing is totally frozen soon enough the primary rough erosion of what white fat it will occur stiff yellows O beautiful beautifully austere be gotten down to, that much rash and achievement that would promote to, but now I know my own red network electrifying this welcome annual hush.

— for Dennis Brutus This year the leaves turn red green black freedom colors each leaf each stitch of grass. I am amazed at my sweet harvest. The prison door has opened and a nation’s heart is released. I am full having spent my greediness in a ritual of joy.

I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital Columbus, Ohio, USA— a country caught between Black and White. I am born not long from the time or far from the place where my great-great-grandparents worked the deep rich land unfree dawn till dusk unpaid drank cool water from scooped-out gourds looked up and followed the sky’s mirrored constellation to freedom. I am born as the South explodes, too many people too many years enslaved, then emancipated but not free, the people who look like me keep fighting and marching and getting killed so that today— February 12, 1963 and every day from this moment on, brown children like me can grow up free. Can grow up learning and voting and walking and riding wherever we want. I am born in Ohio but the stories of South Carolina already run like rivers through my veins.

The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge Outside the window is Jack Kennedy— Standing on one leg and looking jerkily around And staring straight into the room at me. Ask not what your country can do for you— Ask what you can do for your country. Here’s how. That wouldn’t be the way I’d do it. I’m afraid you leave me no choice now. The sequence begins with the grooves Of the carving board Filling with roast beef blood. Everything keeps changing and we want it to, But don’t want anything to change. The pigeons fly back and forth And look like they’re looking for something. I went to sleep in Havana, Turned over on my back in Saigon, And woke up in Kabul, With Baghdad as both air conditioner and down comforter. The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge Outside the window looks really a bit like me, Me standing on one leg and looking jerkily around And looking right into the room at me. Unshaved men run Iran. In consequence, Nixon with his five o’clock shadow Rises from the grave to campaign. His ghost can’t stop—even in broad daylight. In certain neighborhoods, you hear a victim singing, Corazón, you’re chewing on my heart! Don’t forget to spit the seeds out! Rat-a-tat. Shot dead in the street. The pigeon outside on the ledge Came back from Iraq with PTSD. It stands there, standing on one leg in speckled camouflage, Staring in through the window at the VA therapist. Everything keeps changing and we want it to, But don’t want anything to change. Stet. Everything keeps changing and we want it to, But don’t want anything to change. Every day I don’t die is February 30th, And more sex is possible. Flocks of pigeons are whirling around and flash white In the sunlight like they know something. Here’s what. Here’s who needs to be made up. Here’s who I would do. The makeup artist is hard at work in the Oval Office. The fireplace fire is lit with the air-conditioning on full blast.

This bald year, frozen now in February. This cold day winging over the ugly Imperfect horizon line, So often a teeth line of ten buildings. A red flag flapping In the wind. An orange curtain is noon. It all hurts her eyes. This curtain is so bright. Here is what is noticeably true: sight. The face that looks back from the side Of the butter knife. A torn-bread awkwardness. The mind makes its daily pilgrimage Through riff-raff moments. Then, Back into the caprice case to dream In a circle, a pony goes round. The circle's association: There's a center To almost everything but never Any certainty. Nothing is More malleable than a moment. We were Only yesterday breathing in a sea. Some summer sun Asked us over and over we went. The sand was hot. We were only yesterday tender hearted Waiting. To be something. A spring. And then someone says, Sit down, We have a heart for you to forget. A mind to suffer With. So, experience. So, the circus tent. You, over there, you be the girl In red sequins on the front of a card selling love. You, over there, you, in black satin. You be the Maiden's Mister Death.