Felon
Page 2
with all the crystalline brilliance I saw when
my boys first reached for me. This world best
invite more than the story of the children bleeding
on crisp fall days. Tamir’s death must be more
. . .
than warning about recklessness & abandoned
justice & white terror’s ghost—& this is
why I hate it all, the protests & their counters,
the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies
of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces
humanity to the dichotomy of the veil. We are
not permitted to articulate the reasons we might
yearn to see a man die. A mind may abandon
sanity. What if all I had stomach for was blood?
But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir
& I am bound to be haunted by the strength
that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist
the temptation to turn everything they see
into a grave & make home the series of cells
that so many brothers already call their tomb.
IN ALABAMA
A MAN DROPS A COAT ON THE SIDEWALK AND ALMOST FALLS INTO THE ARMS OF ANOTHER
for N.D.
as in almost Madame Cezanne in Red,
almost falling, almost no longer—as in
almost only bent elbows, almost more
than longing, almost more than unholy,
more than skag, white lady, junk, almost
more than the city eclipsing around them . . .
Winchester Gun Factory’s windows as broken
as the pair refuse to be, the two of them
nodding off of diesel, almost greater
than everything missing, the brown sugar,
the adrenaline slowing them down,
the remnants of a civilization emptied
into their veins. The falling man grasps
at the air. Lost in a trance.
These two, anchored by a coat that nearly
slips from a nameless man’s fingers
as he leans parallel to the concrete,
as his arms reach for something absent.
Whatever about reaping. The men eclipse
the sidewalk, & everything else around
them & they sway with a funeral’s pace.
These two, their bodies a still-life lover’s
. . .
drag. I’m in the car with Nicky & we cannot
stop watching. I imagine one whispers I wish
I never touched it. But who, in the middle
of a high that lets you escape time utters
such bullshit. One lacks sleeves; the other
throws seven punches into the air
like an aging featherweight. I learned to box
desiring not to be broken or haunted by
my dreams. & when Boxer throws six
jabs at a cushion of air, I know once
they both wanted to be something more
than whatever we watching imagine.
A car stops in the street. No hazards.
Just stops. & a photographing arm extends
the camera offering history as the only help
the two will get: a mechanical witness.
I photo them capturing this world slowed
to loss, the two men now someone’s memory.
One almost caresses the face of the other.
Lovers are never this gentle, are never this
close to falling & never patient enough to know
that there is no getting up from some depths.
A perfect day that’s just like doom. Own so
fucking world. They lean into each other
without touching. Horse has slowed down
everything. High like that, you can walk for
. . .
hours, & imagine, always that there is a needle
waiting for your veins. & Nicky says it’s a wonder
how something that can have you hold another so
gently could be the ruin of all you might touch.
CITY OF THE MOON
for JB
There walks a man, somewhere,
Wanting the touch of another
Man & somewhere people know
That desire; name the walking man after
You—Jericho, because G-d once
Promised to bring a city to its knees
For the man circling you with
His trumpet. Going down from
Jerusalem a man broke another
Man, they say, those men lost in
Gospel & what G-d can’t fathom:
Odalisque & outstretched arm. They
Don’t know every love is a kind
Of robbery. And sometimes hurt
Is a kind of mending. A body only
Broken by death. Every moan ain’t
A cry. This is always about vulnerability.
How others afraid to touch a man
Who touches a man have need to
Imagine hips & the flesh they flank
As a confession: the body threatens.
Call that fear suffering. The heathen
Is always afraid of a warm body
Against his own. & while some say
Things always return to a man
& his desire to be touched, & touch,
That want to be known, governs us all.
DIESEL THERAPY
His mother told him. Airport bars always pour something nice. Distance makes bartenders understand suffering. That Thursday he was headed fourteen cities away from anyone he knew & the brown was fortification. His daddy built houses. Those that grown men create in their mind & lock themselves inside. The doctors called it bipolar but his moms just said his pops had some shit with him. Turned his head into an airport. He was always running away from something, always fourteen cities away from the people that loved him, even if they were in the house with him. Everything reminded his father of the feds. He’ll say his father taught him to crave brown liquor. Lighter fluid for the brain he would say, as if he, the father, thought it would drown out the noise. Half a dozen years out of prison & every time he walks into an airport he thinks about his father. When he stares down a nice long taste of whisky, he almost wishes there were voices in his head he wanted to drown out—wishes the distance he traveled was something with him, & not the way he stole away from things he couldn’t handle.
IF ABSENCE WAS THE SOURCE OF SILENCE
some things my sons would never hear,
not from my reluctance to speak,
or the thief that has silenced his mother’s
tongue, his grandmother’s tongue,
turned the stare of the woman who, when
it’s far too early for the sun to be out,
sees me turn a corner with a Newport,
the sky & the ground as dark as the fear
& yesterdays she swallows as she crosses
into what might as well be oncoming traffic,
remembering a man from her past—
stories my sons would not know,
not because of a need to hide history,
those bedrooms & boardrooms & work
where trust became carnage;
no, these things would be Pandora’s box
untouched. & yet, they will know—because.
& the because is what I tell my sons,
about what their hands might do, in long
conversations about what the hands
of men do. Their hands, my own.
When I was twelve, a friend
told me of men offering her money
for her slender & young body, she
no older than me then, arms not strong
enough to carry her own weight, let alone
push her past the men who wanted
to own what is hers. Hers just the first
of a story that would keep returning.
&
nbsp; The numbered hurt. Rape, its aftermath
& this account of trauma my boys
would never know if the world differed,
if war did not mean soldiers demanding
the body of a woman as land to plunder.
I keep trying to turn this into sense.
From me, my sons will hear a story about
how hands like theirs, like mine, made
something wretched of the memories
of women we love or don’t know at all. This
is true. & there is a map to take us to
all that hurt. Some silence saying it all. But
let’s say the world is ours. On that day
all the silenced tongues would have
speak, without fear of being doubted,
of the cars & hellos that became dungeons,
of friends who became the darkness
that drowns all until only rage & sadness
remain. & maybe after, we can build
memory that does not demand silence;
all the things that happen now, as if
a part of being, would not be—
& my sons’ lives would be carved
out of days in which their hands
& bodies do not suggest weapons,
days where all their mothers
& sisters can walk down any street
in this world with the freedom
that comes from knowing
you will be safe, after dusk or during
those moments just before dawn
unlike today, & yesterday, & now,
when, the quiet & what might ruin
it, is the threat that circles.
ESSAY ON REENTRY
At two a.m., without enough spirits
spilling into my liver to know
to keep my mouth shut, my youngest
learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell,
a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky,
but History: I robbed a man. This, months
before he would drop bucket after bucket
on opposing players, the entire bedraggled
bunch five & six & he leaping as if
every lay-up erases something. That’s how
I saw it, my screaming-coaching-sweating
presence recompense for the pen. My father
has never seen me play ball is part of this.
My oldest knew, told of my crimes by
a stranger. Tell me we aren’t running
towards failure is what I want to ask my sons,
but it is two in the a.m. The oldest has gone off
to dream in the comfort of his room, the youngest
despite him seeming more lucid than me,
just reflects cartoons back from his eyes.
So when he tells me, Daddy it’s okay, I know
what’s happening is some straggling angel,
lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his
duty, lending words to this kid who crawls
into my arms, wanting, more than stories
of my prison, the sleep that he fought while
I held court at a bar with men who knew
that when the drinking was done,
the drinking wouldn’t make the stories
we brought home any easier to tell.
IN HOUSTON
NIGHT
In the night,—night asleep, her eyes, woman,
my woman, I name her as if she is mine,
as if these hours that pass for the night belong to us;
my nights belong to the memories I can’t shake; my night
& this woman, my woman she tells me how it wasn’t
supposed to be like this. This insight another Hail Mary,
another haymaker. We live somewhere between almost there
& not enough. Almost there. Her dreams & all that she lost
for me is a kind of accounting. My woman, not my woman,
not this night, not these nights: the mine is less mine more
hurt. More hover than anything else. Shadowcloud.
Or as she says it, you stalked me until I submitted. Love
shapes itself into my hands wrapped round her throat. Have you
loved like that? I’ll call your PO is the thing she says,
on this night with the men I robbed still lingering, a threat
to the freedom I imagined she gave when we became
cliché: naked, tangled. This is always about me,
how violence called to me like my woman moans when she
thought all this was the promise of more than a funeral.
When I grabbed her like that the first time, her legs held me
tight. My woman thinking the cells in my past can make
. . .
her control this: all the ways I starve. She threatens
to call my history back as a constraint on madness.
She stared at me, once, & said she saw her brothers
doing life in my eyes. In this night, when we talk to each other,
it is in shouts. The quilt of solitary cells I’ve known confess
that my woman has never been my woman. How ownership
& want made me split that bastard’s head into a scream
is what I’ll never admit to her. What she
tells me: prison killed you my love, killed you so dead
that you’re not here now, you’re never here, you’re always.
Her eyes closed at night & I awaken & swear she
stares at me, she is saying that brown liquor owns me, saying
that the cells own me & that there is no room for her, unless
she calls the police, the state, calls upon her pistol, & sets me free.
ESSAY ON REENTRY
Telling a story about innocence, won’t conjure
acquittal. & after interrogation & handcuffs
& the promises of cops blessed with an arrest
before the first church service ended, I’d become
a felon. The tape recorder sparrowed
my song back to me, but guilt lacks a melody.
Listen, who hasn’t waited for something
to happen? I know folks died waiting. I know
hurt is a wandering song. I was lost in my fear.
Strange how violence does that, makes the gun
vulnerable. I could not wait, & had no idea
what I was becoming. Later, in a letter, my
victim tells me: I was robbed there; the food was great
& drinks delicious, but I was robbed there. I would
consider going back. He said it as if I didn’t know.
Why would he return to a memory like that?
As if there is a kind of bliss that rides shotgun
with the awfulness of a handgun & a dark night.
There is a Tupac song that begins with a life
sentence; imagine, I scribbled my name
on the confession, as if autographing a book.
Tell your mother that. Say the gun was a kiss
against the sleeping man’s forehead,
say that you might have been his lover & that,
on a different night, he might have moaned.
ESSAY ON REENTRY
for Nicholas Dawidoff
Of prison, no one tells you the time
will steal your memories—until there’s
nothing left but strip searches & the hole
& fights & hidden shanks & the spades games.
You come home & become a parade
of confessions that leave you drowning,
lost recounting the disappeared years.
You say fuck this world where background checks,
like your fingerprints, announce the crime.
Where so much of who you are betrays
guilt older than you: your pops, uncles,
a brother, two cousins, & enough
childhood friends for a game of throwback—
all learned absurdity from shackles.
But we wear the mask that grins and lies.
Why pretend these words don’t seize our breath?
Prisoner, inmate, felon, convict.
Nothing can be denied. Not the gun
that delivered you to that place where
. . .
you witnessed the images that won’t
let you go: Catfish learning to subtract,
his eyes a heroin-slurred mess;
Blue-Black doing backflips in state boots;
the D.C. kid that killed his cellmate.
Jesus. Barely older than you, he
had on one of the white undershirts
made by other men in prison, boxers, socks
that slouched, shackles gripping his shins.
Damn near naked. Life waiting.
Outside your cell, you could see them wheel
the dead man down the way. The pistol
you pressed against a stranger’s temple
gave you that early morning. & now,
boxes checked have become your North Star,
fillip, catalyst to despair. Death
by prison stretch. Tell me. What name for
this thing that haunts, this thing we become.
ON VOTING FOR BARACK OBAMA IN A NAT TURNER T-SHIRT
The ballot ain’t never been a measure of forgiveness.
In prison, people don’t even talk about voting,
about elections, not really, not the dudes
you remember, ’cause wasn’t nobody Black
running no way. But your freedom hit just
in time to see this brother high-stepping with
the burden, with the albatross, willing