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I would have come. When you called. But. I had the most beautiful pale pink rose. Its healthy stem was clenched between my teeth. And. Its thorns bit sharply into my tender wet flesh. So. I couldn't answer you. Still. My lips moved at you silently. They offered words you never heard. They screamed inside my crazed brain. Only. It could do nothing for you. In time the petals wilted. They blew away. And. They became compost in someone else's garden. The tough, fibrous stem withered. I bit down hard to snap its grip on me. Then. My teeth fell out. Its thorns had burrowed into my cheeks. They had implanted themselves permanently. They were suckling on my softest tissues. And. Not long after they sprouted tiny shoots. They coiled their way down. I still held the memory of your call. And. The long stemmed beauty lodged next to it. They cleaved unto the long roots curling down my neck. My body held tight and listened. Hard.

up from slobbery hip hyperbole the soles of black feet beat down back streets a Yankee porkchop for your knife and fork your fill of freedom in Philmeyork never trouble rupture urban space fluctuates gentrify the infrastructure feel up vacant spades no moors steady whores studs warn no mares blurred rubble slew of vowels stutter war no more

After stumbling a long time over impossible trails you are up on top. Hardship didn't crush you, you trod it down, climbed higher. That's how you see it. After life has tossed you away, and you ended up on top like a one-legged wooden horse on a dump. Life is merciful, it blinds and provides illusions, and destiny takes on our burden: foolishness and arrogance become mountains and marshy places, hate and resentment become wounds from enemy arrows, and the doubt always with us becomes cold dry rocky valleys. You go in the door. The pot lies upside down in the hearth, it sprawls with hostile black feet.

Here lies Jonson with the rest Of the poets; but the best. Reader, would’st thou more have known? Ask his story, not this stone. That will speak what this can’t tell Of his glory. So farewell.

TO THE LORD FAIRFAX See how the archèd earth does here Rise in a perfect hemisphere! The stiffest compass could not strike A line more circular and like; Nor softest pencil draw a brow So equal as this hill does bow. It seems as for a model laid, And that the world by it was made. Here learn, ye mountains more unjust, Which to abrupter greatness thrust, That do with your hook-shouldered height The earth deform and heaven fright, For whose excrescence, ill-designed, Nature must a new centre find, Learn here those humble steps to tread, Which to securer glory lead. See what a soft access and wide Lies open to its grassy side; Nor with the rugged path deters The feet of breathless travellers. See then how courteous it ascends, And all the way it rises bends; Nor for itself the height does gain, But only strives to raise the plain. Yet thus it all the field commands, And in unenvied greatness stands, Discerning further than the cliff Of heaven-daring Tenerife. How glad the weary seamen haste When they salute it from the mast! By night the Northern Star their way Directs, and this no less by day. Upon its crest this mountain grave A plump of agèd trees does wave. No hostile hand durst ere invade With impious steel the sacred shade. For something always did appear Of the great Master’s terror there: And men could hear his armour still Rattling through all the grove and hill. Fear of the Master, and respect Of the great Nymph, did it protect, Vera the Nymph that him inspired, To whom he often here retired, And on these oaks engraved her name; Such wounds alone these woods became: But ere he well the barks could part ’Twas writ already in their heart. For they (’tis credible) have sense, As we, of love and reverence, And underneath the coarser rind The genius of the house do bind. Hence they successes seem to know, And in their Lord’s advancement grow; But in no memory were seen, As under this, so straight and green; Yet now no further strive to shoot, Contented if they fix their root. Nor to the wind’s uncertain gust, Their prudent heads too far intrust. Only sometimes a fluttering breeze Discourses with the breathing trees, Which in their modest whispers name Those acts that swelled the cheek of fame. ‘Much other groves’, say they, ‘than these And other hills him once did please. Through groves of pikes he thundered then, And mountains raised of dying men. For all the civic garlands due To him, our branches are but few. Nor are our trunks enow to bear The trophies of one fertile year.’ ’Tis true, ye trees, nor ever spoke More certain oracles in oak. But peace, (if you his favour prize): That courage its own praises flies. Therefore to your obscurer seats From his own brightness he retreats: Nor he the hills without the groves, Nor height, but with retirement, loves.

XLV. Upon the Vine-tree. What is the Vine, more than another Tree, Nay most, than it, more tall, more comly be? What Work-man thence will take a Beam or Pin, To make ought which may be delighted in? It's Excellency in it's Fruit doth lie. A fruitless Vine! It is not worth a Fly. Comparison. What are Professors more than other men? Nothing at all. Nay, there's not one in ten, Either for Wealth, or Wit, that may compare, In many things, with some that Carnal are. Good are they, if they mortifie their Sin; But without that they are not worth a Pin.

We were sitting there, and I made a joke about how it doesn’t dovetail: time, one minute running out faster than the one in front it catches up to. That way, I said, there can be no waste. Waste is virtually eliminated. To come back for a few hours to the present subject, a painting, looking like it was seen, half turning around, slightly apprehensive, but it has to pay attention to what’s up ahead: a vision. Therefore poetry dissolves in brilliant moisture and reads us to us. A faint notion. Too many words, but precious.

Stoned by no Rosetta, merchants allowed through the fence learn to misspeak “black speak,” in Edgar’s harbor village, at HipHop Fish & Chicken on Route number 4 × 10. “Baby Girl” becomes XX. “My Man” assumes all XY. For salt & pepper curls, & baby stroller crowds, their broadcast is the same: “Baby Girl, your diabetes is ready.” “Main Man, your stroke order is up.” They know their audience: french fried lives, french fried luck, french fried us. They know corner markets of cornered markets, seldom scale the wall. Their shit is always hot. Their shit is always cheap. Their shit is always landmark of poison in pens, along with: windows wearing boards, hubcaps leaning curbs, the sound of “bitch,” the sound of “mother- fucker,” the sound of “niggah” sounding off, projectile vomiting from children’s lips — our hush puppy young, made beasts behind these bars. Some days you will see them, dirt bike knights, riding Edmondson Avenue, armor-less. They are wheelies, jousting against traffic, wheelies, jousting against stop- lights, gas tanks bleeding out on stretchers, as sirens serenade, metal flies hover. There are skeletons of chickens scattered on the ground. There are meeting bones of children fractured in the street, cordoned off. This is urban warming. This is underwear in exhibition, pants saddened to sag, hanging off ass cracks, like wet clothes on a line. This is the ecology of locks, since our country is locks, since our color is locks, since this block is locked. When your order is up, you will eat anything tossed inside the cage.

My childhood was not an anxious place, though I lay in my bed, awake, thumbing my sheets like beads, wondering when the sun imploded would Russian astronauts be OK, they in their Sputniks, with their space dogs, they that chased their own tail around this water bowl we call Earth. When I was a child, in elementary school we practiced a type of protection called Duck and Cover, where we huddled under desks in case of a nuclear attack by the Russians. They were communists, had the bomb, and were evil Reagan told us from the small grave of a TV screen. In the sixties, Nixon said the same thing, and the Panthers countered with "the Viet Cong never called me nigger" With their picks like unclenched fists, with their afros like the plume of an atom bomb, they scared white and black folks alike. It is 2014, and America is still scared of the Russians and black people; now the American Dream is to be debt free, which I am not, nor may ever be, but at least I'm no longer afraid of the Russians.

A battle lost in the cornfields and in the sky a victory. Birds, the sun and birds again. By night, what will be left of me? By night, only a row of lamps, a wall of yellow clay that shines, and down the garden, through the trees, like candles in a row, the panes; there I dwelt once and dwell no longer— I can't live where I once lived, though the roof there used to cover me. Lord, you covered me long ago.