194 Racism and discrimination poems

bijan been dead 11 months & my blue margin reduced to arterial, there’s a party at my house, a house held by legislation vocabulary & trill. but hell, it’s ours & it sparkle on the corner of view park, a channel of blk electric. danny wants to walk to the ledge up the block, & we an open river of flex: we know what time it is. on the ledge, folk give up neck & dismantle gray navigation for some slice of body. it’s june. it’s what we do. walk down the middle of our road, & given view park, a lining of dubois’ 10th, a jack n jill feast, & good blk area, it be our road. we own it. I’m sayin’ with money. our milk neighbors, collaborate in the happy task of surveillance. they new. they pivot function. they call the khaki uniforms. i swift. review the architecture of desire spun clean, & I could see how we all look like ghosts. 3 squad cars roll up at my door & it’s a fucking joke cuz exactly no squad cars rolled up to the mcdonald’s bijan was shot at & exactly no squad cars rolled up to find the murders & exactly no one did what could be categorized as they “job,” depending on how you define time spent for money earned for property & it didn’t make me feel like I could see less of the gun in her holster because she was blk & short & a woman, too. she go, this your house? I say yeah. she go, can you prove it? It say it mine. she go ID? I say it mine. she go backup on the sly & interview me going all what’s your address—don’t look! & hugh say I feel wild disrespected. & white go can you explain that? & danny say how far the nearest precinct? & christian say fuck that. & white go can you explain that? I cross my arms. I’m bored & headlights quit being interesting after I called 911 when I was 2 years old because it was the only phone number I knew by heart.

hey music and me only white, hair a flutter of fall leaves circling my perfect line of a nose, no lips, no behind, hey white me and i’m wearing white history but there’s no future in those clothes so i take them off and wake up dancing.

there is a dark mass following me. these legs are clumsy. they flap quickly. I want to slow them down. but my nerves.Lord, these pensive endings. the sun slumps against the merging fall on red leaves. and where the natives are unenlightened, the mass comes closer. only white people swim in lakes nowadays you know . . . Crystal Lake? never seen a black person jump in a lake; let alone a river till this summer. the Bronx River is said to be clean: we care about clean. a month before, two boys drowned in the Bronx River. a week after, a boy jumps into it unfazed. abandoned tires, relics of its sewer days, river herring spark no fear. and a publicly funded park with a biology class, a boat-making workshop for the children of Hunt’s Point, gives me hope we’d wet our hair again. (these follicles don’t surf; don’t swim) but here in Virginia, there’s little comfort. the blush current from underwater springs makes me tense. white people form groups to paddle on boards across the Hudson, taking on trends from Hawai’i. they tap into the yesterdays of Algonquian tongues. Wappinger. Mohican. a sporty new aged (like gouda) convenience. a luxury to admire when Long Beach is too far and Rockaway too dirty. black folk don’t swim. we splash and cool off. we a ways forward from a Splenda hint of Senegalese manliness diving from a ferry, miles off shore from Gor é e. that water got too much memory. we much prefer chlorine. that salt and fresh water our hypertension. and that ocean is curiously scary. and this lake is charmed and churning with tales from the deep. profound is this river of B-rated torture. deep are shadow people speculated through my rave tangerine goggles. on Lake Champlain at night, the chilly air felt like a presence. swamp monsters (this ain’t a swamp). tubular amphibians (they’d be in rivers). aquatic reptilians. ancestors distraught and vengeful (like Jason). but this is smaller and gnawing like chiggers; something from my weed days could live. down. here. my arms fight the green clearness. so mud olive I cannot see the bottom. beneath me is crisp. a fallen branch is mistaken for an eel.

especially the rarest kind / or the kind named Priscilla G & not drowning in bleach cream / creamy spin / but spinning blades on a black Nina gunship in the gargantuan ghetto / not killing & maiming my brothers & potential husbands / when the working mothers give up & when they do not & when boys in their mad survivalist tactics want a movie sex parade / silk-edging their sweaty fists in 30 watt lit basements just because / death switch of a future / none of that has to do with any kind of blackness or a crazed horizon in the plumed summers of Los Angeles wherein television reenactments of real fathers didn't occur enough for news sidebars / but more than generally believed / they showed up to dailiness / cash in hand but as the school year revved up the rest of the madness had nowhere to hide / ballooned horizon / chemical concerns / fire up the blue turbines / fire up unconscious intention plus the acne of ignorance / on the city's glittery filth façade but not because of blackness / not for me / when I would get home sometimes there might be food sometimes just blackness I could live on / which I love

Pandemic of lilies                          dreaming majesty hovers like sweat & unwraps you & you are in love it makes you bad,    bad is your name is the desert is movement                                      long kiss heavy gut            slow slow hands                 in your seeds

Why “raspberry jam tree?” Acacia acuminata. Mungart. The guilt of cut wood? Its smell, its bloody show? And that colorist’s jam envy, the lust for ropes of raspberry. Fence-posts sturdy and hardy and doused in creosote: to stand alone in Termitesville. The sweetness turns rust. And burnt offerings unless dried right through — say for a year on the pile. Hot as hell to fire. Nothing comes cost-free, we hear — those layers of its dozen years a demonstration in history as accumulation. Collective survey of occupation: the real corps de ballet, the shrubby scenery, bulldozed on roadsides. Ring a Ring o’ Roses. All those brandings. Emblem of our town that would miss no more than our rates. “High turnover” region. Think raspberry jam on white damper, think coals of fires. The meager shade for sheep and cattle and the denial of “unproductive” animals. Nuisances. Saw deep into rough bark, showered in pollen. Unholy fires at the end of winter; and all that premonition, all those seeds with snow in their bellies, snow that can’t fall from this faraway sky. So overwhelmingly familiar to me. No Old Country raspberry homesickness. Just an inkling of anthocyanin pigments. Why “raspberry jam tree?” Acacia acuminata. Mungart.

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

1 One night in April or May, his daughter saw someone's hand make the curtain which was drawn tightly across her window bulge and ran to the adjoining room in her night clothes where he and his son were sitting. He ran around the house one way and his son ran the other way and they found a Negro under a workbench within six or eight feet of the window holding a piece of plank before his face— begging them not to shoot. 2 The Negro was dead when the doctors examined him. They found upon his belly bruises: he died, the doctor said, of peritonitis. The jailer testified that the Negro had been brought to the jail charged with burglary; but no warrant for his arrest was produced and the jailer did not know—or tell— who brought him. The Negro said that a crowd of men had taken him from a store to the woods and whipped him with "a buggy trace." He was not treated by a doctor, the jailer, or anybody: just put into the jail and left there to die. The doctor who saw him first—on a Monday— did nothing for him and said that he would not die of a his beating; but he did die of it on Wednesday.

Even alleged militants blame the vanishing of the summer sea ice on “Ghosts” (short version) by Albert Ayler. He disappeared while he was getting his sound together. No one knows what happened but the water high in increments like a crown around his cries and glass is a liquid and you have to forgive your parents for whatever it is and they have to forgive themselves I would like to use this craft to fly with him I feel that saddle the morning after and try — again — warm in the habit of our warning and yearning for more of  them until We finally need to see this reckoning But when it’s time I’m not ready and when I’m ready it’s not time — that’s fate. And blind in the halo of so-what, so-what, we make it a future I say,I don’t know who you are. I say,It don’t matter at this point,I do it all for you anyways(long run) — gorgeous photographs of industrial ruins so lush you want to lick them, be them, become a trend. Crushed under the debris, an instrument is so tender it breaks and mends in the same note. Becoming men is like that, degrading, uplifting, denial, lazily caving in Isis and ice until all of our guesses are obsolete we can’t see nobody who isn’t disappearing

1 In which I try to decipher the story it tells, this syntax of monuments flanking the old courthouse: here, a rough outline like the torso of a woman great with child— a steatite boulder from which the Indians girdled the core to make of it a bowl, and left in the stone a wound; here, the bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson, quill in hand, inscribing a language of freedom, a creation story— his hand poised at the word happiness. There is not yet an ending, no period—the single mark, intended or misprinted, that changes the meaning of everything. Here too, for the Confederacy, an obelisk, oblivious in its name—a word that also meant the symbol to denote, in ancient manuscripts, the spurious,corrupt,or doubtful; at its base, forged in concrete, a narrative of valor,virtue,states' rights. Here, it is only the history of a word, obelisk, that points us toward what's not there; all of it palimpsest, each mute object repeating a single refrain: Remember this.