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To be a good ex/current friend for R. To be one last inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship advice for L. To be advice for my mother. To be a more comfortable hospital bed for my mother. To be no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time, America for my uncle, who wants to be China for me. To be a country of trafficless roads & a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go fast. To be a cyclone of laughter when my parents say their new coworker is like that, they can tell because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t, can’t be one of them. To be the one my parents raised me to be— a season from the planet of planet-sized storms. To be a backpack of PB&J & every thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming their own storms. To be, for me, nobody, homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D & be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars, simple decoration for the new apartment with you. To be close, J., to everything that is close to you— blue blanket, red cup, green shoes with pink laces. To be the blue & the red. The green, the hot pink.

is surely a peculiar answer for any teacher to receive when asking a kindergartner, but on second take, what word best describes me, crossbreed of butterfly and Super Fly aesthetics, other than peculiar? I suppose calling me a keen kid would also suffice in explaining my avidity for the kind of death that progresses the narrative of a gentling history, because that’s the only frame for greatness I seem to find for boys my shade and age to aspire to, short of having the height and hops to touch the rim, or the bulk and burst to break through the defensive line like a bullet. And, no, I haven’t given up on the prospect of Bulls starting shooting guard yet, but the God-fearer impressed upon me begs the mythology of goodness delivered to the multitudes like loaves and fish; how King is talked about in a black Christian tradition still in mourning over his lost rays of light, the way mentioning the name of Malcolm makes mice of shady white men some thirty years after the shotgun and he’s sung of as a prince: I want to evoke that level of pride in American democracy’s dark downtrodden because I know what it invokes in me, young and impressionable, watching Denzel’s mimicry for the one millionth time in my abbreviated existence — drawing an X on my undeveloped chest, pushing it out into the unknown-ahead hoping a Mecca for melanin rises from the man-shaped hole I’d left in my loved ones’ lives. I bet my parents would be so proud of me. I bet post offices would close on my birthday. I bet God would dap me up when I got up there and Jesus — dying on a cross to meet me.

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d, And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy, But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn, When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light, When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise, And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy, O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well, And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend, And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores, I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me, For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night, In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me, And his arm lay lightly around my breast – and that night I was happy.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

1 When I spoke the words I am gay I had let them fester like blood on a prison cell wall. I hadn’t known that they would free themselves. They scaled the swollen gutter of my throat, and shot themselves right through Uncle Andy’s diaphragm, holding the air in lungs hostage so he had no words left of his own. He could only unfurl his vinegar lips to sputter silent thank you s across my brow. I kissed the darkness three times, because it stole those three merciless words from me before my Mother could. She told me that I would never survive a New York winter: Mother, painted face and gossamer cheeks. It wasn’t you walking down the hall to Economics, when you heard a familiar voice, a voice that told jokes you always laughed at in class, and he said:I can tolerate faggots, but if they flirt with me, I wouldn’t hesitate to beat them down.

in the backseat of my car are my own sons, still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard me warn them against playing with toy pistols, though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t like, not what I fear, because sometimes I think of  Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping all another insignificance, all another way to avoid saying what should be said: the Second Amendment is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance that says my arms should be heavy with the weight of a pistol when forced to confront death like this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play in the backseat while the video of  Tamir dying plays in my head,& for everything I do know, the thing I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar of poetry, the moment when a black father drives his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death of a black boy that the father cannot mention, because to mention the death is to invite discussion of  taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson that touches the concrete must belong, at some point, to you, the police officer who justifies the echo of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets because his mind would not accept the narrative of  your child’s dignity, of  his right to life, of  his humanity, and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed; the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding on crisp fall days;& this is why I hate it all, the people around me, the black people who march, the white people who cheer, the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of   humanity that we erase in this American dance around death, as we are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood, and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away, the memories,& that I could abandon all talk of making it right & justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything they see into a grave & make home the series of cells that so many of my brothers already call their tomb.

When I used to focus on the worries, everybody was ahead of me, I was the bottom of the totem pole, a largely spread squat animal. How about a quick massage now, he said to me. I don’t think it’s cool, I replied. Oh, said he, after a pause, I should have waited for you to ask me. The waves came in closer and closer. When I fall into the gap of suspicion I am no longer here. In this world that has got closed over by houses and networks, I fly out from under the belly.     Life’s dizzy crown of whirling lights, circles this head.    Pure with wonder, hot with wonder.    The streets become golden.     All size increases, the colors glow, we are in myth. We are in easy understanding. Scarcely talking, thoughts pass between us. It is memory.    As I search to find this day’s sweet drifting.    The fog out to sea, the wind.

When I was fair and young, then favor graced me. Of many was I sought their mistress for to be. But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore: Go, go, go, seek some other where; importune me no more. How many weeping eyes I made to pine in woe, How many sighing hearts I have not skill to show, But I the prouder grew and still this spake therefore: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more. Then spake fair Venus’ son, that proud victorious boy, Saying: You dainty dame, for that you be so coy, I will so pluck your plumes as you shall say no more: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more. As soon as he had said, such change grew in my breast That neither night nor day I could take any rest. Wherefore I did repent that I had said before: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

“It must be awful,” she said to the dog locked in it as she left the kitchen that wasn’t hers, closing its door, to head up the stairs with every good thing she could find to eat in her arms (to eat in her arms—O Katherine!) “not to have any arms.”