517 Social commentaries poems

Let’s make a movie called Dinosaurs in the Hood. Jurassic Park meets Friday meets The Pursuit of Happyness. There should be a scene where a little black boy is playing with a toy dinosaur on the bus, then looks out the window & sees the T. Rex, because there has to be a T. Rex. Don’t let Tarantino direct this. In his version, the boy plays with a gun, the metaphor: black boys toy with their own lives, the foreshadow to his end, the spitting image of his father. Fuck that, the kid has a plastic Brontosaurus or Triceratops & this is his proof of magic or God or Santa. I want a scene where a cop car gets pooped on by a pterodactyl, a scene where the corner store turns into a battle ground. Don’t let the Wayans brothers in this movie. I don’t want any racist shit about Asian people or overused Latino stereotypes. This movie is about a neighborhood of royal folks — children of slaves & immigrants & addicts & exiles — saving their town from real-ass dinosaurs. I don’t want some cheesy yet progressive Hmong sexy hot dude hero with a funny yet strong commanding black girl buddy-cop film. This is not a vehicle for Will Smith & Sofia Vergara. I want grandmas on the front porch taking out raptors with guns they hid in walls & under mattresses. I want those little spitty, screamy dinosaurs. I want Cicely Tyson to make a speech, maybe two. I want Viola Davis to save the city in the last scene with a black fist afro pick through the last dinosaur’s long, cold-blood neck. But this can’t be a black movie. This can’t be a black movie. This movie can’t be dismissed because of its cast or its audience. This movie can’t be a metaphor for black people & extinction. This movie can’t be about race. This movie can’t be about black pain or cause black people pain. This movie can’t be about a long history of having a long history with hurt. This movie can’t be about race. Nobody can say nigga in this movie who can’t say it to my face in public. No chicken jokes in this movie. No bullets in the heroes. & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy. Besides, the only reason I want to make this is for that first scene anyway: the little black boy on the bus with a toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there.

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“Southern Tradition of Eating Dirt Shows Signs of Waning” —headline, New York Times , 2/14/84 tra dition wanes I read from North ern South: D.C. Never ate dirt but I lay on Great- grandma’s grave when I was small. “Most cultures have passed through a phase of earth- eating most pre valent today among rural Southern black women.” Geo phagy

scooby-doo was trying to tell us something when every time that monster mask got snatched off it was a greedy white dude. • in ’97, a black comic gets on stage, 
says,you ever notice how white dogsbe like woof woof & black dogs be likeruff ruff motherfuckaaaaa!! • the dog upstairs won’t shut up & i’ve thought of ending his  little  noisy 
life but i have to remember he 
matters he matters & if i did the 
brown girl upstairs would cry forever. • dog (n.): a man’s best friend. (see: fetch, roll over, K-9, good boy, put down.) ex.my dog died, I had to do it with my own hands. dawg (n.): a man’s best friend. (see: blunt rolled already, handshake, my nigga, put me on.) ex.my dawg died, he did it with his own hands. • dogs in this house eat the same thing we do. we eat greens, he eat 
greens. fried bologna, neck bones, 
leftovers. ...    he died from the suga, the gout or whatever 
 came for big mama came 
back for the dog. • everybody love Lassie, but what 
about Sounder? • possible rite of passage #37: graduating from outrunning the 
block’s dogs to outrunning the block’s police. • i too have been called boy & expected to come, kneel. • what Animorph did you want to be? i wanted to be the boy who turned into the bird limp in the dog’s wet mouth, holding me toward his human saying I made 
this for you. • the dog upstairs needs to stop running his mouth talking all that shit I can hear him up there fool don’t think i understand he don’t know i got a bark too teeth too thumbs & a terrible child’s mind. • something about Air Bud felt    ...    
the talented obedient beast, the roar of the eggshell crowd. • dogs aren’t racist but they can be trained to be so as can the water as can the trees as can gravity as can anything marked by a pale hand & turned bloodgold a bitter king’s magic touch. • i’m the kind of werewolf that turns into a shih tzu. ruff ruff motherfucka. • while my grandmama spoke on the clean blood of Jesus i watched the hounds in the mud hot for anything warm & thought of something better to worship. • i stand in the dark bathroom in my tightest shortest shorts my vaselined legs the only things catching light. i say i’m a real bitch3 times, clap my hands above my head. nothing happens. i walk back into the club, put my hand on a man’s chest & it’s a paw. • the gay agenda made CatDog to offer your child’s gender to their seven-headed god. • a dead dog is a hero, a dead lion is a hero, a cloned sheep is a miracle, a dead child is a tragedy (depending on the color, the nation, the occupation or non-
occupation of the parents). • during the new moon i switch from an –a to the traditional –er, i raid the farm, smash the melon patch, swallow chickens whole, spit out the bones ground down 
to smoke, howl Geee-zuss! toward the sky’s great nothing. • • dog bred to smell the coke/dog bred to smell the bomb/dog bred to smell the nigger hid beneath the floorboards. • dude’s dog won’t leave the room won’t let his lord out of his sight 
won’t let his master disappear won’t let himself go hungry won’t let nothing happen to the one who brings the water even if it means being owned, being witness to his hunger. or maybe he’s just dumb. • stay. open. stay. look at me. stay. open. teeth. bad. bad. stay. open. treat. treat. pant. wag. treat. good. stay. good. stay. • i listen to DMX smoking a blunt doing bout 90 in a 55 when the cop ask if i know why he pulled me over 
i say i’m just trying to be me. • the dog upstairs won’t shut up but i can’t hate him he’s up there alone all 
day making noise must be the only way he knows he’s not a ghost.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to drink from my water bottle. This water bottle? That's right. Open it and drink from it. / At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to take off my shoes. Take off my shoes? Yes. Both Please. / At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked if I have a fever. A fever? Really? Yes. Really. / My grandmother is in a nursing home. It's not bad. It doesn't smell like pee. It doesn't smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the hall past the common room and the nurses' station, old person after old person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls. It's like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are what is wanted, your company. In third-world countries I have felt overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.

There is a button on the remote control called FAV. You can program your favorite channels. Don’t like the world you live in, choose one closer to the world you live in. I choose the independent film channel and HBO. Neither have news programs as far as I can tell. This is what is great about America—anyone can make these kinds of choices. Instead of the news, HBO has The Sopranos. This week the indie channel is playing and replaying Spaghetti Westerns. Always someone gets shot or pierced through the heart with an arrow, and just before he dies he says, I am not going to make it. Where? Not going to make it where? On some level, maybe, the phrase simply means not going to make it into the next day, hour, minute, or perhaps the next second. Occasionally, you can imagine, it means he is not going to make it to Carson City or Texas or somewhere else out west or to Mexico if he is on the run. On another level always implicit is the sense that it means he is not going to make it to his own death. Perhaps in the back of all our minds is the life expectancy for our generation. Perhaps this expectation lingers there alongside the hours of sleep one should get or the number of times one is meant to chew food—eight hours, twenty chews, and seventy-six years. We are all heading there and not to have that birthday is not to have made it.

Down from another planet they have settled to mend The Hampton Institute banisters. They wear bow ties and braces. The flutings they polish with a polished hand. Wingless, they build and repair The mansions of what we have thought to be our inheritance. Caution and candor they labor to maintain. They are out of phase. I prepare To burn all gentle structures, greek or thatch, Under the masterful torch of my president here and abroad, Till stubble outsmolders, and muslim and buddhist crack In the orbit of kiln. A smoke To some calm Christian plant will drift, To where they are mending their mansions, beside of whose doors They are standing at ease, they are lifting the fans Of unburdenable wings.

In the constant lutte to not become that bougie housewife of an athlete taking too much oxy while the help cooks ethical fried chicken for my family and I’m also the help and the television sighs and wags in the back     some Wendy Williams   rerun and     this is acceptable and celebrating neon israel and soul     is so radio :     I walk alone.   I know myself. Or so I chant in the mirror right around discovering that trap music is all the new negro spiritual / righteous delirium try to defund the clown in the en   in negro       say it a little   less     enter the New Yorker in Desdemona’s     scarf     and be this generative   productive whistle     blower for the radicals / coal at the root of slow kill and not scream     at the Salvadorian man with the leaf blower   in my landscape     and hide him and his hoes       when the ICE raid follows and swallow mister PCs   pcp    ,   in this constant     creaseless / as in iron willed / as in   willow weep for me /     effort to love my enemy I became him       The body of me. Its erotic     disbelief temporarily suspended .    alongside the American eagle     : temptation to define freedom     as   consumerism, justice as my right to an object in a special whites only window : see that seedless eagle run the heavens so : suspended and     hovering over my own safe house and spraying it with liquid hog manure     literally. Check WikiLeaks.     Assange looks like a creep but he saves everybody but himself     so   he must be.         Negro do you wanna be that     creepy?

The housewives laugh at what they can’t avoid: In single file, buckling one by one Under the weight of the late summer sun, They drop their bags, they twitch, and are destroyed. He hears a voice (there is a bust of Freud Carved on the mountainside). He tucks the gun Under his rented beard and starts to run. (“The housewives laugh at what they can’t avoid.”) Like She-bears fettered to a rusted moon They crawl across the parking lot and shed Tearblood. The office park is closing soon. Night falls. The neighborhood buries its dead And changes channels—Zap! Ah, the purity Of death and taxes and Social Security.

I: THE MOTOR: 1905 From hedgerows where aromas fain would be New volleyed odours execrably arise; The flocks, with hell-smoke in their patient eyes, Into the ditch from bawling ruin flee: Spindrift of one abominated sea Along all roads in wrecking fury flies Till on young strangled leaf, on bloom that dies, In this far plot it writes a rune for me. Vast intimate tyranny! Nature dispossessed Helplessly hates thee, whose symbolic flare Lights up (with what reiterance unblest!) Entrails of horror in a world thought fair. False God of pastime thou, vampire of rest, Augur of what pollution, what despair?