Kevin Young

Closed Mondays is music    is men off early from work    is waiting for the chance at the chair while the eagle claws holes in your pockets    keeping time    by the turning of rusty fans    steel flowers with cold breezes    is having nothing better to do    than guess at the years of hair    matted beneath the soiled caps of drunks    the pain of running a fisted comb through stubborn knots    is the dark dirty low down blues    the tender heads of sons fresh from cornrows    all wonder at losing    half their height is a mother gathering hair    for good luck    for a soft wig    is the round difficulty of ears    the peach faced boys asking Eddie to cut in parts and arrows wanting to have their names read for just a few days    and among thin jazz    is the quick brush of a done head    the black flood around your feet    grandfathers stopping their games of ivory dominoes    just before they reach the bone yard    is winking widowers announcing cut it clean off    I’m through courting and hair only gets in the way

Crashing again—Basquiat sends fenders & letters headlong into each other the future. Fusion. AAAAAAAAAAA. Big Bang. The Big Apple, Atom's behind him— no sirens in sight. His career of careening since—at six— playing stickball a car stole his spleen. Blind sided. Move along folks—nothing to see here. Driven, does two Caddys colliding, biting the dust he's begun to snort. Hit & run. Red Cross—the pill-pale ambulance, inside out, he hitched to the hospital. Joy ride. Hot wired. O the rush before the wreck— each Cadillac, a Titanic, an iceberg that's met its match—cabin flooded like an engine, drawing even dark Shine from below deck. FLATS FIX. Chop shop. Body work while-u-wait.In situ the spleen or lien, anterior view—

The light here leaves you lonely, fading as does the dusk that takes too long to arrive. By morning the mountain moving a bit closer to the sun. This valley belongs to no one— except birds who name themselves by their songs in the dawn. What good are wishes, if they aren't used up The lamp of your arms. The brightest blue beneath the clouds— We guess at what's next unlike the mountain who knows it in the bones, a music too high to scale. *       *       * The burnt, blurred world where does it end— The wind kicks up the scent from the stables where horseshoes hold not just luck, but beyond. But weight. But a body that itself burns, begs to run. The gondola quits just past the clouds. The telephone poles tall crosses in the road. Let us go each, into the valley— turn ourselves & our hairshirts inside out, let the world itch—for once— *       *       * Black like an eye bruised night brightens by morning, yellow then grey— a memory. What the light was like. All day the heat a heavy, colored coat. I want to lie down like the lamb— down & down till gone— shorn of its wool. The cool of setting & rising in this valley, the canyon between us shoulders our echoes. Moan, & make way. *       *       * The sun's small fury feeds me. Wind dying down. We delay, & dither then are lifted into it, brightness all about— O setting. O the music as we soar is small, yet sating. What you want— Nobody, or nothing fills our short journeying. Above even the birds, winging heavenward, the world is hard to leave behind or land against— must end. I mean to make it. Turning slow beneath our feet, finding sun, seen from above, this world looks like us—mostly salt, dark water. *       *       * It's death there is no cure for life the long disease. If we're lucky. Otherwise, short trip beyond. And below. Noon, growing shadow. I chase the quiet round the house. Soon the sound— wind wills its way against the panes. Welcome the rain. Welcome the moon's squinting into space. The trees bow like priests. The storm lifts up the leaves. Why not sing.

Mudd Club 4th floor gallery Manhattan, April 1981 If you bomb the IND or tag the 2 downtown —gallery-bound— dousing it in tribal shrapnel, you're it —the shit— If you can lie between the rails —Please Stand Clear the Closing— or press yourselves betw. train & the wall spray can rattling like a tooth— The roof the roof the roof is on fire

There's a way a woman will not relinquish her pocketbook even pulled onstage, or called up to the pulpit— there's a way only your Auntie can make it taste right— rice & gravy is a meal if my late Great Aunt Toota makes it— Aunts cook like there's no tomorrow & they're right. Too hot is how my Aunt Tuddie peppers everything, her name given by my father, four, seeing her smiling in her crib. There's a barrel full of rainwater beside the house that my infant father will fall into, trying to see himself—the bottom— & there's his sister Margie yanking him out by his hair grown long as superstition. Never mind the flyswatter they chase you round the house & into the yard with ready to whup the daylights out of you— that's only a threat— Aunties will fix you potato salad & save you some. Godmothers, godsends, Aunts smoke like it's going out of style— & it is— make even gold teeth look right, shining. saying I'll be John, with a sigh. Make way out of no way— keep they key to the scale that weighed the cotton, the cane we raised more than our share of— If not them, then who will win heaven? holding tight to their pocketbooks at the pearly gates just in case.