I think X marks a continent of loss.
I think the more you multiply the more you have.
I think so much depends on personal pronouns.
D.
I think the inverse of history is heritage.
I think heritage halved is power.
I think power has varied degrees.
I’m still thinking personal pronouns.
A.
I think who you are says a lot.
I think the second person implies two sides.
I think it says less plus less equals less.
I think it says more plus more equals more.
S.
I think deducting anything adds a negative sign.
I think the question equals more than five answers.
I think statistics can’t fix quotes or crises.
I think this is problematic.
Stakes Is High
. . . ’cause his life is warfare.
—MOS DEF AND TALIB KWELI
You know those people who are uncomfortable
having a conversation at a comfortable level?
Like, you ask Tony his thoughts on Kobe
or the LA Lakers. And Tony responds:
Schwarzenegger ruined their state.
Four years in office and more debt than ’03?
Come on, man. Fuck California.
Yeah. So Tony’s my dad. He’s retired
but doesn’t know it. He thinks sleep is
death’s first cousin. Early a.m.s
my brother and me tiptoe meandering routes
around our house, avoiding his line of sight.
These are the hours he tunes to AM talk.
Reads his paper where the stakes are high.
Two Decembers ago, my brother Brian and me.
We’re sharing cognac sips and cigarillos
shooting stars in a powdered driveway
when dad breaks from the Al Sharpton Hour.
Tracks prints to basement floor. He starts in
on precipitation: What type of grown-ass men
trek lines of snow through a house?
Me and your mama raised you better than that.
He shifts into hyperbole: When you two start
having kids, I hope you take plenty of movies.
Your mama and me plan to kick back—watch
the decline of common courtesy. Then Brian
makes a wrong move. Smiles. Says snow was
trailed in a square. Technically a half rhombus.
Pops leaves us. Leaves the earth: Oh, so you
wanna joke about geometry? I hear scientists
developed a system for tracing racist thoughts.
Can you use your math on that?
Someone should make a drug to kill every last
bigot in the world. They should pump that shit
through the faucets. Drunken laughs march Dad out.
In what world does he live? Michigan bigots
own bunkers. Unregistered land. And if I spent
one summer as a survey worker, if I phoned a woman
named Shanquita and assumed she lived in a hood,
is that intra-racist? Is it double-back racist to assume
you assume she was black? To assume you are not?
Would I be exempt from the ax? Could a black poet
fail the test? Let’s say yes. Let’s call my F a defect
of private schooling and exclusive subdivisions.
Let’s call my death another gulp in the throat
of history’s tireless typhoon, spinning backward.
The Light
I caught it like a shard of glass catches a beam.
How a stranger’s smile can level a man. Can light
his sunken chest. Swell a new breath. In other words
I was the shard who glinted your eyes. In that light
blue halter, fifth hour, you were the poetry
I normally ignored. Your ballpoint’s clean marks. Light
blue, light touch against my windbag essays. That made
you especially stunning. Made you lightening
I had to harness, hand in hand, beneath a desk. Or
in an unattended dark room. Tenderly, red light
washing over us. As I did. Abruptly—telling
you it takes the right type of girl to make a black-white
relationship work. You loved how Common rapped “The Light.”
I listened to him more than you. His sly anti–white
woman rhymes never touched me. But you. You filtered through
a magnifying glass. Warmed the cherry orchard, white
with frost. Your light sweetened my pit. You are lightning
crashed through his pulpit into this poem. Beaming. Yes, white.
A gleaming ax hacked through what we were growing into.
I was the ax. You were two syllables too many. White
space in a wheeling sonnet. A corner I couldn’t turn
in nine lines. But now I am mourning. Thanks to you, first light.
Bonita Applebum
Do I love you? Do I lust for you?
Am I a sinner because I do the two?
—A TRIBE CALLED QUEST
Because you introduced me to Wu-Tang
kung fu flicks, Five Fingers of Death
& 36 Chambers
over quarter candy & sweet peach Faygo
pop on a playground bench.
Because you held my hand
as I cranked the boom box volume knob.
Because you lived next door to my boy B.
Because he slept through twelfth grade
to the tape-recorded husk of your voice.
Because he never graduated
he stayed home & mostly kicked it
with a hustler, turned third-shift grinder.
His name was D. He lived by you too.
B. got fed, turned out cool & normal.
Because I nodded to your chest’s thump
under a rocket’s trail of smoke
strong enough to trace every porch
couch, box spring & classroom in Kzoo.
Your cherry gloss lingered around
each Olde E bottle I downed.
Because I studied you in college.
I want you to sound bad.
Because you are mine.
Because I refuse to share
let’s say you’re an overwhelming
total body high.
Because your mouth
is the nectar & squish of a peach.
Because your lips are the color
of a flowering quince.
You ghost-rode your banana-seat
bike through my yard. Miss Bonita,
I caught your bug & couldn’t kick it.
Who in their right mind thinks they can put a stop to hip-hop, if it don’t stop till I stop, and I don’t stop till it stops?
So wrap your cultured-up skull around this. I woke
to a red cross stenciled onto mismatched logs
and “The Entertainer” weeping from a black baby
grand—each note a hound dog’s droopy ear. Hear
me when I say, I was lost. Stranded at a teen arts camp
so north in the UP I was hearing southern tongues.
Some flanneled blond man trailed a finger in the air.
Bumped cha head perdy good there. Reckon ya
twisted that ankle on this. He aimed at my foot
with the bottom of a snapper’s lacquered shell—
hazy compact, reflecting a dark, faceless me. Am I
in heaven? I asked. He cackled at that; shaking his
bronze leather face at the wall, No, no. ’Least not like him.
My vision steadied on a hunchback boy in a yellowed white
tee as I rose from the cot. His erratic, thunderous sniffling
spooked words in my throat: Is he going to be, all right?
—Oh yeah. That there’s just my little boy, Tim.
Been
carryin’ on like that since a babe. Just a-cryin’ and playin’
piano that way. Go’on over and say hello.
I joined the boy of five or six at the small black bench
and forced a nervous smile. Timmy’s glassy blue eyes
kept time with a wooden metronome. His pupils shrank
and grew. Shrank and grew; dilating on each upbeat.
What if I said he wrapped my hands around his
wrist? Would you think me stoned as Snoop Dogg
at a slain rapper’s wake if I told you he stared? That
he wept and played? You think I’m talking shit.
His pupil’s penny-size screen flashed small
looped horrors: the snapper’s shriveled head
lopped off with a Boy Scout knife; a muscled teen
pissing on an old, vagrant man, drooling snuff
on courthouse steps; the night clerk’s nose stud
nailed to a bloody boot heel. You better believe
I bounced; hopped toward an exit. But Timmy
kept on playing, drilling notes into me
like a downpour thumping a well.
True story. The boy never left that room.
Go ahead. You can ask me how I know.
The Message or Public Service Announcement Trailing a Meth Lab Explosion
The edge I’m at is eleven feet high and safer than
the dirt lot below, where shattered glass doubles
as ground. Three rusted-out pickup trucks
have been outfitted with yellow steel boots
and stuffed with flames, igniting steady gusts
of ammonia—bodily and actual—a smell
inextricably related to the tear ducts that also
combusted here, and why I’m standing atop
a single-wide eyeing punched-in mobile home
darkness. I’m thinking
about Grandmaster Flash. “The Message”:
an open row of a freshly set chessboard, bleak
beneath a pink, umbrella-donned table. And
the two rats, fat as badgers, schlepping around
a dog’s charred carcass is the move I will make
to hurt you. It’s 3 a.m. I just pulled off a Nowhere,
Indiana road to watch a trailer park smoke. A fist
of ash like nail polish scorched with salt blasts
me to my knees. Everything disintegrates
from this angle. Bit by bit. Like blacktop
sweating off layers in sun. Like police tape
singed with flame. From this point of view
soot cloaks stars. Even a white, grinning moon
finds its cheekbones eliminated here. I’m talking
about real lives and white rock rubble. Eyelids,
pocked with reddening cinder. Noses, eroded
and raw. I’m wondering if a face on fire
looks the same in any city. In any hue.
A phone rings an answering machine awake.
The trailing silence hearkens a boarded-up
project building. And in one great big empty
alleyway after another, people are boxed in
or burning up. Vanishing into thin air. Here
I am again, sketch pad in hand, glued to this spot
watching smoke stifle everything—white
and black chess pieces melting in slow mo.
The Chronic
& the mother cops a stiff
pull from the glass bong.
& murky water gurgling
in the bulb-like chamber
is barely heard but indistinctly
audible over Roy Ayers’s
interstellar vibe. & smoke clouds
the bong’s fat green neck
& glides down the woman’s throat
into her belly
where it blooms into a beautiful
exhale. Toke two
takes the same route
but springboards
from the gut, splatters
a brain cell. & in that small
space & for nine sublime songs
sun trickles into her thoughts.
She thinks about hydroponics. About
five-gallon buckets & fertilizer.
About thousand-watt sodium vapor
lights, pruning shears &
the invisible hand. She considers
the self-regulating nature
of a marketplace. How it’s all bullshit
& doesn’t apply to her
life. How her insides are a kind
of marketplace. She thinks
about supply & demand &
obtrusively marked state lines.
About how people are never this way.
How our states are so rarely
pronounced. The way we’re always
passing through this & that
in the supermarket or Laundromat &
without batting an eyelash.
She contemplates clam chowder.
How it costs a buck
but triggers New England
Xmas morns, gifts netting
her childhood & the bed
of a pickup truck—
a man’s hand hooking her throat.
She thinks about dirt roads &
green, green grass. The number
of yards crossed
to put a ziplocked smile
in her hands. & it doesn’t
matter what’s bothering the woman.
It’s heavy. & back in the room
her two little boys are laughing &
zooming toy cars along carpet
or coiling springy phone cords
around their necks. & good
or bad those kids are learning something.
Some states are harder to access
every year. & the mother could just
as easily be a father. & down
the block & around the corner & in
double-wides & mansions
this is happening. & these people sit
inches from your cubicle.
They teach in your schools & sing
in your choir. Make your lattes
& dental appointments. They walk
your streets & sleep in
your bed. & on & on & on. &
sometimes these people
are you.
The Break Beat Break
originates from “Break Beat.” As in,
the faithful kick drum ride cymbal solo pattern
that never fails to unlock a host of holy ghosts
in any B-boy with a pulse. As in, James Brown.
Anything by James. As in, the “Amen Break”—
six seconds of a liquored-up Gospel B-side.
The break in Break Beat Break comes from you.
It is part of our collective audio unconscious.
A pause for the cause. The cause being the body’s
never-ending addiction to movement, which, spun
backward on a turntable, would reveal a link
to thought. It happens on a deserted island
of a song, when a funky-ass fault line rips through
your bass-induced Buddhist empty state and you
start thinking, Damn. What breed of human am I?
What type of man walks around with rhythm rattling
the trunk of his dome? And wherever you are you run
to the closest piece of light-reflecting glass, say Oh,
that’s right, I do. You become a drum-dumb addict
and never recover. You let the Break Beat break
into your closet. Headphones on, you nod toward
high-water cords, think Yeah, that’s me.
My walk alone could make tight pants fit.
You bounce to the bathroom absentminded, brush
teeth with Break Beat Breaks. They start
looking like moldy gold fronts, and you say
Yo, this yellow is classic! An unfilled cavity.
You’d gladly crumble a break into a blunt
wrapper, roll it up, and smoke if you could
keep that mighty Midas-high in your body
for even thirty days. Baby, when the break starts
knocking everything you think turns to music.
And dancing never felt so motherfucking right.
Notes on Beats, Breaks & B-Sides
“Ars Poetica in the Mode of J-Live”
Composed in the mode of J-Live’s “It’s Like This, Anna.”
“When faced with the statement ‘there are more black men in jail than college,’ I think Order of Operations”
Title remixes the following lines from Showbiz and A.G.’s “Runaway Slave.” “Nine out of ten are black on black crimes / Four out of nine were killed before their prime / The other five wanted vengeance / So now five out of five are doing a jail sentence.”
“Stakes Is High”
Title samples De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High.” Epigraph samples Black Star’s “Astronomy (8th Light).”
“The Light”
Title samples Common’s “The Light.” Poem alludes to lines from Common’s “Hungry.” “Downtown interracial lovers hold hands / I breathe heavy like an old man with a cold can of Old Style.”
“Bonita Applebum”
Title and epigraph sampled from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum.”
“Who in their right mind thinks they can put a stop to hip-hop, if it don’t stop till I stop, and I don’t stop till it stops?”
Title samples J-Live’s “Longevity.”
“The Message or Public Service Announcement Trailing a Meth Lab Explosion”
Title samples Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.”
“The Chronic”
Title samples Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors of the following journals where these poems appeared, sometimes in earlier forms:
Anti- / “The Break Beat Break,” “Self-Dialogue with Marcus”
Beloit Poetry Journal / “Maybe the Saddest Thing,” “The Message or Public Service Announcement Trailing a Meth Lab Explosion,” “Who in their right mind thinks they can put a stop to hip-hop, if it don’t stop til I stop, and I don’t stop til it stops?”
Boston Review (Online) / “Stakes Is High”
Cave Canem XIII / “To You”
The Collagist / “The CEO of Happiness Speaks,” “To You”
Columbia Poetry Review / “Love Letter to Dave Chappelle”
Crab Orchard Review / “Some Revisions”
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