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And that other time after we got carjacked in L.A. on the way home from Spago. Like a scene outta that movie I don’t like about those hoes I don’t love. It is hard out there for a pimp. A white woman and her brown babies /brown babies in a fancy car with unlocked doors. Most everything is semi-automatic. Two black men hopped into the front row seats and started waving guns like pom-poms.We made it! We made it! Right against the rim of her porcelain brain. All they wanted was the car and the color. The car was white like her. She saved our lives. Then the penguins came over with a book full of photos of black men, so serious like kings in their mugging, and they asked us to pick which two it was. I was five but I could feel the shrugged evil of it so true and impossible to touch as I pretended to recognize us. We closed our eyes and pointed at you, and said,I don’t know that man. Je ne connais pas cet homme. We saved our lives. We tugged at the flashlight looking for bruises and found you awake, and found a way.

Do not despair of man, and do not scold him, Who are you that you should so lightly hold him? Are you not also a man, and in your heart Are there not warlike thoughts and fear and smart? Are you not also afraid and in fear cruel, Do you not think of yourself as usual, Faint for ambition, desire to be loved, Prick at a virtuous thought by beauty moved? You love your wife, you hold your children dear, Then say not that Man is vile, but say they are. But they are not. So is your judgement shown Presumptuous, false, quite vain, merely your own Sadness for failed ambition set outside, Made a philosophy of, prinked, beautified In noble dress and into the world sent out To run with the ill it most pretends to rout. Oh know your own heart, that heart's not wholly evil, And from the particular judge the general, If judge you must, but with compassion see life, Or else, of yourself despairing, flee strife.

Do not embrace your mind’s new negro friend Or embarrass the blackballed jew with memberships: There must be years of atonement first, and even then You may still be the blundering raconteur With the wrong story, and they may still be free. If you are with them, if even mind is friend, There will be plenty to do: give the liars lessons Who have heard no rumors of truth for a long time But have whatever they hear on good authority, Whether it concerns Chinese women or the arts. Expose the patrons, some of whose best friends Are brothers, and who are never now anonymous: What kind of credit do they expect for that, Ask them, or better, ask their protested brothers, The grateful tenants who can’t get their curtsies right. Finally the injured, who think they have no friend, Who have been convinced by the repeated names That they are jews or negroes or some dark thing: They must be courted with the lover’s touch And as guiltily as if yourself had turned them inward. If you complete this program, you will have friends From all the rich races of your human blood: Meantime, engage in the often friendless struggle. A long war, a pygmy war in ways, But island by island we must go across.

Do not make things too easy. There are rocks and abysses in the mind As well as meadows. There are things knotty and hard: intractable. Do not talk to me of love and understanding. I am sick of blandishments. I want the rock to be met by a rock. If I am vile, and behave hideously, Do not tell me it was just a misunderstanding.

O darling, the moon did not disrobe you. You fell asleep that way, nude and capsized by our wine, our Bump ‘n’ Grind shenanigans. Blame it on whatever you like; my bed welcomes whomever you decide to be: thug- mistress, poinsettia, John Doe in the alcove of my dreams. You can quote verbatim an entire album of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony with your ass in the air. There’s nothing wrong with that. They mince syllables as you call me yours. You don’t like me but still invite me to your home when your homies aren’t near enough to hear us crash into each other like hours. Some men have killed their lovers because they loved them so much in secret that the secret kept coming out: wife gouging her husband with suspicion, churches sneering when an usher enters. Never mind that. The sickle moon turns the sky into a man’s mouth slapped sideways to keep him from spilling what no one would understand: you call me God when it gets good though I do not exist to you outside this room. Be yourself or no one else here. Your do-rag is camouflage-patterned and stuffed into my mouth.

I mean to really live? Kick a spook in the stomach and commit to yourself and not be committed. Sit through another because I got it like that yoga class where a Coldplay soundtrack competes with the upbeat white chick reminding you to be present, to thank yourself for making it to your mat. Point to any place on the map and blow it up. Blow up spots. Why you gotta blow up spots? I loved Lebanon, never quite made it. I spit out the sudden ash with Don Cherry in Marrakech. I lifted one chiseled leg so high over my head Magic City had called and the ATL was ready to blow me up and I said,please. Do I do.What you do. Sing with me. Another shooter made it first and the ACLU was a petty bunch of pseudo-saviors but they blew up spots that one day. So many sad stories you start laughing at the wrong time and you thought yours was one ’til the time working at Ailey with the girl whose mom was killed by her very own daddy in front of the just-say-no rainbow she drew him in class. She wears heavy aquamarine eyeshadow and closes the gap between feeling and being. I’m glad you’re Dorothy Dandridge. Ban on that word, daddy. Banksy sees the zoo in you and cages hisself in bluer notes. I go wild and will, and will. Myth is a special kind of killer and I love her atonal smile. Without her we’d all go bye-bye, point to a place in the rap and make it a black hole, let it suck us in hug the cuckolded sucker emcees and let it hold us against our certain demolition. Without her you would find it hard to live. All the opiates would shrivel into sickle cell and all the blood running through the streets would keep on believing in bodies —  what obsolete machines, the only ones worth saving. Thank yourself for making it     for being present for the cold ache you sit with and rock into situations     for the way you exploded in nuclear winter and thought you had dreamed it     and made a new world bent as your denial     reached forth to caress it all and it shocked your fingertips     this is the bravest numbness

“Do you remember me? or are you proud?” Lightly advancing thro’ her star-trimm’d crowd, Ianthe said, and lookt into my eyes, “A yes, a yes, to both: for Memory Where you but once have been must ever be, And at your voice Pride from his throne must rise.”

Do you remember the rude nudists? Lazing easy in girth and tongue, wet slops and smacks of flesh as they buttered every crevice. Sungrunts. Blubberpalaver. We were always hiking some hill toward some beauty some human meanness ruined. We were always waiting too long to let ourselves be seen. It was an ocean's gesticulations, articulate elephant seals, grounded clouds grown all one mouth. What could we do but laugh, casting clothes aside as if the air were ice and water a warm bed, goose-stepping goose-pimpled past their appeased surprise into the waves. What could we do? We could—we did—love take a long look at each other and creep quietly away.

In the thirtieth year of life I took my heart to be my wife, And as I turn in bed by night I have my heart for my delight. No other heart may mine estrange For my heart changes as I change, And it is bound, and I am free, And with my death it dies with me.

Felicity the healer isn’t young And you don’t look him up unless you need him. Clown’s eyes, Pope’s nose, a mouth for dirty stories, He made his bundle in the Great Depression And now, a jovial immigrant success In baggy pinstripes, he winks and wheezes gossip, Village stories that could lift your hair Or lance a boil; the small town dirt, the dope, The fishy deals and incestuous combinations, The husband and the wife of his wife’s brother, The hospital contract, the certificate ... A realist and hardy omnivore, He strolls the jetties when the month is right With a knife and lemons in his pocket, after Live mussels from among the smelly rocks, Preventative of impotence and goitre. And as though the sight of tissue healing crooked Pleased him, like the ocean’s vaginal taste, He’ll stitch your thumb up so it shows for life. And where he once was the only quack in town We all have heard his half-lame joke, the one About the operation that succeeded, The tangy line that keeps that clever eye So merry in the punchinello face.