Thomas Sayers Ellis

for Amiri Baraka Old Ark, how funky it was, all those animals, two of every kind, and all that waste, the human shit somebody had to clean up. Somebody, some love you hugged before fear, the fear of an in-sani-nation, the No Blues, ruined your bowels. Go devil. Public programs like Race. Dems a Repub of Dumpster Molesters, Congressional whole-part bidders on your ugliest clown. Left wing, right, the missing moderates of flightless fight. Private like the Runs. God evil. Somebody had to clean that shit up. Somebody, some love who raised you, wise. Feathered razors for eyebrows, alto, tenor. Wasn’t no branch. Some say a tree, not for rest either. For change. When was we a wild life, long-eared and short. Prey, some prayed for the flood. And were struck by floating, corporate quintets of Rocks and Roths, assets bond Prestige. First Organizer ever called a Nigga, Noah, but not the last Occupier of Ararat ... got thick on Genesis and electric cello, cell-phone-shaped UFOs fueled by the damp, murdered clay of divinity-based Racial Mountain Dirt. Somebody had to clean that shit up. Some native body, beside the smooth water, like a brook Gwen say, “I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.” Chaser if you straight. Ark Old Ark New Ark Now Only                                  Only Sidney P                           Simple JessB would                                would ____ Spencer T              ____ Dizzy G to turn                               to accent the dinner                         the p’s cheek.                                not the “ ... nuts.” Change the record, Record Changer. Name Change the changing same. Something only you could Art Messenger & dig in any chord. High water, like the woods of secrecy, always a trail a ways a coming. God evil. Move the “d.” Go devil. The Mosque watchers know. Also de wind, de wind and de Word, spoken and written, hidden in love with the intestines of  Testament. Eyes like a woman’s fist, her hard facts — not the crying, domestic consonants “of non being.” Soprano, piano, or the cultural cowardice of class, in any chord of standardized “sheeit” music, lowcoup risks slit. Though flawed, too, by penetrable flesh, some blue kind. Unlike a pretty shield, loaded free. Wasn’t just Winter or lonely. Those. Wasn’t just Sundays the living did not return. Crouch if you a bum or one of  Mumbo Jumbo’s reckless, poisonous reeds. A neck crow man ser vant n a jes’ grew suit. Us am, an unfit second Constitution. Us am, an ambulance full of ... broke-down, as round as we bald. Obeying hawkish eagles. Why the young Brothers so big, what they eatin’, why they blow up like that, gotta wear big white tees, gotta wear white- skin sheets, like maggots, like lard, the domestic oil of death and klan sweat, who blew them up, doctored, who pickin’ them off like dark cotton, make them make themselves a fashion of profitable, soft muscular bales, somebody got to clean this shit up. All us, us animals, on one floating stage we knew was a toilet, the third oldest in the nation, unreserved. Wasn’t no bank or branch. Yes we Vatican, despite Alighieri’s medium rare, rate of interest. It was confirmation. Some say black fire wood. Some love that changed our screaming Atlantic bottoms when all we could be was thin olive sticks with battered whore-ti-cultural beaks, and eastern screech. Flushed, too, every time the Yew Norker or one of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s traitorous X Jedi Clampett hillbillies fresh prince’d us    ... The real religion, our “individual expressiveness” wasn’t dehuman-u-factured by a Greek HAARP in a Roman uni-dot-gov-versity. Where we Away our Steel, “flood” means “flow.” Where we Tenure our Ammo, “podium” means “drum.” Flood, flow. Podium, drum. Flood, drum. Podium, flow. Drum, podium. Flood, flow. Used to be a whole lot of chalk around the Ark, then anger, then angels, their wings made of fried white dust, fallen from when the board of knowledge was public and named after a stranger or rich crook, an anti-in immigrant-can’tameter stretched across the teepee-skin, chairs of class where we clapped the erasers, fifty snows old, like we were the first Abraham, where we clapped the Race Erasers and drove away from K  James V and K Leo PB in shiny Lincolns, sprinkling holy sheeple from the sky, their powdery absolute Rule. Just add oil-water. Belongs to humanity. Just add sugar-rubber. Belongs to civilization. Gold. Days. Nights. Ounces. A forty. Mules move. A forty. Move. Move. Move mule. Whatchamacall “how we here,” and get no response ... how we ... where we fear, how we hear how we sound and how sometimes time is some even our own sound fears us, and remembers the first us, confronting Columbus with thunderbolts,  when “was-we” not good- citizen sober, “was-we”voting and drowning,  and rotting like “we-was” the armed guts of our young? Now a daze, tribe-be-known, the devil the best historian we got. Anyhow.

Nikita zips across stage Trailed by a troop of white-gloved One-wheelers: Killer Joes, The 12 & Under Crew In disguise. A sixth sense guides him Beyond darkness. An Inner voice says when, Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, I’ll tell you when

My father was an enormous man Who believed kindness and lack of size Were nothing more than sissified Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded, His eyes were the worst kind Of jury—deliberate, distant, hard. No one could outshout him Or make bigger fists. The few Who tried got taken for bad, Beat down, their bodies slammed. I wanted to be just like him: Big man, man of the house, king. A plagiarist, hitting the things he hit, I learned to use my hands watching him Use his, pretending to slap mother When he slapped mother. He was sick. A diabetic slept Like a silent vowel inside his well-built, Muscular, dark body. Hard as all that With similar weaknesses —I discovered writing, How words are parts of speech With beats and breaths of their own. Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam! An heir to the rhythm And tension beneath the beatings, My first attempts were filled with noise, Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows. The page tightened like a drum Resisting the clockwise twisting Of a handheld chrome key, The noisy banging and tuning of growth.

Any half-decent rapper Can conjure the dead, Can reach into graves And accuse God Of Indian-giving. The trick is ancestral, No more magic than memory’s Hidden strings & chains. Trust me, We haven’t forgotten a name. Say them. Raise your hands. Holler at me!

All those Liquid love affairs, Blind swimmers Trusting rumps. We wiggled, Imagining water. Wet, where was The One? Nevermind Atlantis And the promise Of moving pictures, A lit candle In the window Of our conscious minds. Those who danced, Pretending to swim Underwater, Did so out Of pure allegiance. Some wore snorkels Made with The waistbands Of funky underwear, Others wet suits With clothespins Clamped to their noses, Airtight as Black Power handshakes. Rump-by-rump, The strings attached To our thangs were Reeled into The Deep And rhythmic as fins, Schools of P signs Flapped and waved Like flags. One nation Under a groove. No one held their breath In the flashlit depth. No one sank.

Or Oreo, or worse. Or ordinary. Or your choice of category or Color or any color other than Colored or Colored Only. Or “Of Color” or Other or theory or discourse or oral territory. Oregon or Georgia or Florida Zora or Opportunity or born poor or Corporate. Or Moor. Or a Noir Orpheus or Senghor or Diaspora or a horrendous and tore-up journey. Or performance. Or allegory’s armor of ignorant comfort or Worship or reform or a sore chorus. Or Electoral Corruption or important ports of Yoruba or worry or Neighbor or fear of . . . of terror or border. Or all organized minorities.

A part of, a part of love, hates, hates a part of. A part of, a part of hate, loves, loves a part of. Loves a part of, a part of the man, the man the state hates. Hates a part of, a part of the name, the name the people love. Hates wholeness, hate. Loves togetherness, love, the togetherness of the large human movement. Loves togetherness, loves. Hates wholeness, hate, the wholeness of the small human hyphen. De Wet, de Klerks. De Klerk, de Wets. Botha. Moneydeala, your worship makes an island of freedom. Detained Harassed Banned. The trap, the trap, the trap. The capture, the capture, the capture. The trial, the trial, the trial. So do we So we to. So do the Cape parts, a part of, the Dutch parts. Ho wick, Ri vo nia. She Who Tries her sacred knock, her High Organ of little male Anasi. Her Eastern Star in his Malta night. Order, a part of. Breytenback's albino, Gordimer's Beethoven. A part his, a part hers. The odor of Resistance, Brutus Dennis! A part invests. Victor, a Verster. A part divests. All American     Apartheids    pulled South. Dela "

All their fences All their prisons All their exercises All their agendas All their stanzas look alike All their metaphors All their bookstores All their plantations All their assassinations All their stanzas look alike All their rejection letters All their letters to the editor All their arts and letters All their letters of recommendation All their stanzas look alike All their sexy coverage All their literary journals All their car commercials All their bribe-spiked blurbs All their stanzas look alike All their favorite writers All their writing programs All their visiting writers All their writers-in-residence All their stanzas look alike All their third worlds All their world series All their serial killers All their killing fields All their stanzas look alike All their state grants All their tenure tracks All their artist colonies All their core faculties All their stanzas look alike All their Selected Collecteds All their Oxford Nortons All their Academy Societies All their Oprah Vendlers All their stanzas look alike All their haloed holocausts All their coy hetero couplets All their hollow haloed causes All their tone-deaf tercets All their stanzas look alike All their tables of contents All their Poet Laureates All their Ku Klux classics All their Supreme Court justices Except one, except one Exceptional one. Exceptional or not, One is not enough. All their stanzas look alike. Even this, after publication, Might look alike. Disproves My stereo types.