Terrance Hayes

If you subtract the minor losses, you can return to your childhood too: the blackboard chalked with crosses, the math teacher’s toe ring. You can be the black boy not even the buck- toothed girls took a liking to: this match box, these bones in their funk machine, this thumb worn smooth as the belly of a shovel. Thump. Thump. Thump. Everything I hold takes root. I remember what the world was like before I heard the tide humping the shore smooth, and the lyrics asking:How long has your door been closed? I remember a garter belt wrung like a snake around a thigh in the shadows of a wedding gown before it was flung out into the bluest part of the night. Suppose you were nothing but a song in a busted speaker? Suppose you had to wipe sweat from the brow of a righteous woman, but all you owned was a dirty rag? That’s why the blues will never go out of fashion: their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves of consequence; that’s why when they call, Boy, you’re in trouble. Especially if you love as I love falling to the earth. Especially if you’re a little bit high strung and a little bit gutted balloon. I love watching the sky regret nothing but its self, though only my lover knows it to be so, and only after watching me sit and stare off past Heaven. I love the word No for its prudence, but I love the romantic who submits finally to sex in a burning row- house more. That’s why nothing’s more romantic than working your teeth through the muscle. Nothing’s more romantic than the way good love can take leave of you. That’s why I’m so doggone lonesome, Baby, yes, I’m lonesome and I’m blue.

Who I know knows why all those lush-boned worn-out girls are Whooping at where the moon should be, an eyelid clamped On its lightness. Nobody sees her without the hoops firing in her Ears because nobody sees. Tattooed across her chest she claims Is BRING ME TO WHERE MY BLOOD RUNS and I want that to be here Where I am her son, pent in blackness and turning the night's calm Loose and letting the same blood fire through me. In her bomb hair: Shells full of thunder; in her mouth: the fingers of some calamity, Somebody foolish enough to love her foolishly. Those who could hear No music weren't listening—and when I say it, it's like claiming She's an elegy. It rhymes, because of her, with effigy. Because of her, If there is no smoke, there is no party. I think of you, Miss Calamity, Every Sunday. I think of you on Monday. I think of you hurling hurt Where the moon should be and stomping into our darkness calmly.

Why are you bugging me you stank minuscule husk Of musk, muster & deliberation crawling over reasons And possessions I have & have not touched? Should I fail in my insecticide, I pray for a black boy Who lifts you to a flame with bedeviled tweezers Until mercy rises & disappears. You are the size Of a stuttering drop of liquid — milk, machine oil, Semen, blood. Yes, you funky stud, you are the jewel In the knob of an elegant butt plug, snug between Pleasure & disgust. You are the scent of rot at the heart Of lovemaking. The meat inside your exoskeleton Is as tender as Jesus. Neruda wrote of “a nipple Perfuming the earth.” Yes, you are an odor, an almost Imperceptible ode to death, a lousy, stinking stinkbug.

Inside me is a black-eyed animal Bracing in a small stall. As if a bird Could grow without breaking its shell. As if the clatter of a thousand black Birds whipping in a storm could be held In a shell. Inside me is a huge black Bull balled small enough to fit inside The bead of a nipple ring. I mean to leave A record of my raptures. I was raised By a beautiful man. I loved his grasp of time. My mother shaped my grasp of space. Would you rather spend the rest of eternity With your wild wings bewildering a cage or With your four good feet stuck in a plot of dirt?

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone. I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold While your better selves watch from the bleachers. I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow- Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls. I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart. Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous Darkness. Probably all my encounters Are existential jambalaya. Which is to say, A nigga can survive. Something happened In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens Almost everywhere in this country every day. Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters. You won’t admit it. The names alive are like the names In graves. Probably twilight makes blackness Darkness. And a gate. Probably the dark blue skin Of a black man matches the dark blue skin Of his son the way one twilight matches another.