Authors: Saul Williams
and he chose.
Can I show her the bowl of fruit on my floor where you sit
naked and hungry, pear juice dripping down your chin
and puddling in my own mouth?
Or ask if she has ever followed salt sweet lines
down her back with a lover's tongue?
Can I give her the handful of cherries, thick-fleshed,
like the first moment I tasted my own sex?
Imagine the smell of that kitchen; my mother
sucking pits like small wet songs on her dry tongue.
Leek rounds, rainbow chard, coriander, broth
slow-cooked, I don't mention the room
in the house of me where you live,
desire and
devastation
sleeping curled
together like dogs at the doorway.
We came from each other, and then we began to eat
from separate plates, elbows off
the table. She gives me her borsht recipe
without measurements,
says: do it to taste,
and I do
i am
not
beautiful
i am an
elegant
beast
a well-mannered monster
a charming barbarian
that will pillage your heart
with language
so lavishly
violent
that you will curse me for coming
yet curse me for going
your crying and your moaning
will share the same sound
i am the storm
that will make your sunny days unbearable
but when the clouds begin to hug and swell
and push black kisses into each other
when the white and airy
becomes dark and full
you will know im in the mouth of the horizon
and she will breathe me
thundering across your heaven
all good reason
says seek shelter
but you will invariably find yourself
running into a open field
the wind
shooting under your skirt
a furious sky in your hair
goosebumps on your thighs
your mouth open to catch the rain
that smacks your face
your tear ing eyes
towards heaven
waiting for me to send down
my most gorgeous disaster
my most frightening lovely
for which you have spent your sunny days supplicating
woe to you, God has answered your prayer
“We need a doctor in the ICU, description elderly couple, 1 suffering from a shivering equinox
The other bad case of eclipse”
Momma “We didn't hang their
ghost
out long enough to dry” washboard, clothes line
It's always hard wringing the bones out
of a spirit
Some days, I fold my throat; pack it in the truck of a black hearse cramped
Middle passage cruise liner, hopscotch down
Route 81, countryside hums like
midnight
, the air thick with the history of me
Here I'm all white picket fence and picket sign
“Check their vitals”
My great-grandparents used to bathe in onyx, bore last names delicate as cotton
“Garner” with an ER like sirens, gurneys or an
Eerie house sculpted from the pulse of one womb
The smell of a praying skillet playing jacks with a pot of grits
Back burner like welts, Church on Sunday morning, in a town
That tastes like nooses, winters fever porch swing backyard hammock
Fist full of rice, jumped the broom, segregated blood waiting on the other side
“Let's put him over here, lift”
“Boy this contraption can't hold me long, what's my superhero name iron lung”
Marlboro lights and silence is all I know of my great grandfather
Worked the coal mines, called him big O for Otis, godly hands, grip
Like a bear trap shake Christ out of you,
Earthly man, never able to crack the husk of him
Crucified footprints, dirt roads burning U-Hauls
The clan moved in next door
“We're going to have to run more tests”
“Come rub gram grams feet, massage a few decades from my steps”
My great-grandmother's name was Esther
All apron and foxhound had a bite like boycott, smiled like pistol whips
2 green thumbs patch of land, her eyes two dilating ashtrays
Ribcage furnished like a western salon, bar fight laughter
Protest the moonshine, this is a sit-in
“Not to be the bearer of bad news, but we found something, no cause for alarm with treatment
You can see 6 more months”
I'm a shade of flatline
(cough)
“Don't smoke cigarettes, son “
Otis died crying crickets in his chest, crooked cops place a handcuff
Over a heartbeat this is what you call cardiac arrest
Cells were never meant to split this way
“I know this is hard, one by one you can go in and say your last words”
Poppa, hold me in your arms like a rigid mountain peak
“Shhhhh
don't tear, boy, I've been breathing like a steel mill all my days, 'bout time I retire”
Momma, don't leave, “Child, watch my crops, scare the Jim crows”
see their souls rising; I take my palms to try shoving their childhoods back into their bones
This is my defibrillator to the sky all that
Thunder clap!!
“No more bullets on hotel balconies
No fire hose baptisms
“They're not responding”
Pink ribbons, crumbling Saint Jude, heart-shaped obituaries
“I told you about my Jesus
Look heaven, freedom's waltzing across that labyrinth dance floor
Million cloud March boots laced, silver lining stride to redemption”
“Baby we'll see you on the other side of the colored line”
I turn to the doctor and ask him when will we have a cure for this?
Not all errors are mistakes
Brutal images often evoke emotion but
offer no hope against this harsh landscape
Let us open wide the doors less fortunate
so that the heavy
wind
, rain and snow can rush in
and
save us from the black clouds lurking over the blood red horizon
Old incandescent
light
bulbs flicker in dimly lit corridors
Let's listen to the tragically beautiful silence of the morning after
There is no escape from the time and place where fiction occurs
Of the sunken barge in the water where life has taken root,
we know the moral.
We know where there is waste something can be profited.
We know for nature there is no waste.
Only opportunity. That is the charge you granted us,
early in the garden, before we ducked behind the elephant ear
to hide our nakedness. That was the first ch
a
rge, at least.
The second: that we'd never forget.
We know that all we realize is
derivative
of
your
love
.
That everything we know will not eliminate what we don't:
why parade this beauty in our faces? Why make desirable
the bones of the men who must have embraced
the night the barge slipped under? Forgive me, Father.
I am human. That means I have an ego.
That means I can't find solace in the tree that now commands
this ship, the branches stretched and
twisted
as your love,
although they also,
like
the bones,
make me choke.
What do you want me to say,
that I like the idea of being an animist, trees my
preferred object of worship? Not once has any
tree
ever told me a thing let alone scooped me up and saved me
from the impending flood or an army of orcs surging
from the bowels of earth, sorry, Gaia, ok, Yemaja,
-yeah, yeah, The Ocean, let me finish-
I
have
listened carefully . . . once I climbed a six-story-high Maple to listen.
Just when I felt I was making some headway a drunk childhood friend
(we were friends since we were children and then adolescents experimenting
with everything from heights, to alcohol to God, just like you want to
instead of normal flirting) climbed one branch above me to see what I was up to.
The last
branch
actually, which snapped under her light, perfect athletic young body.
She fell six stori
es
, landing on her back conscious enough to know instantly
she was paralyzed and would never ski again. No, that by no means broke her
faith, nor mine, but I highly doubt swapping notes on spiritual practices
is her preferred method of
flirting
. She is still devoted to sports.
I have not had visions when holding crouching dog for too long or is it arching crane?
I have done neither, but one time I went to Havana
with
a person much like yourself.
We got a reading from a santero, he gave us beads and a deity each, the beads were so heavy
we had to take the D Train to Brighton Beach and throw them into the sea.
I'm short of breath in saunas so I have never done a sweat lodge but three of my four
deadliest car crashes happened in Vermont where there are many non-Native American
sweat lodges
and after emerging miraculously unscathed from
the gnarled remains
of 3 out of 4 accidents
(once it was snowing) the sky was profoundly clear and blue, yeah like a door,
maybe a window, not sure.
Sure I've had a poem just
âcome to me as if I were a mere vessel
,' but not for
a long time and even those needed editing. Nothing sticks a thorn in my crown
more than a poet fishing to get laid with some spiritual mumbo-jumbo all prostrate
in a room full
of
guppies. You are correct, the gods' ability to arouse is profound and
not inappropriate but it can be awkward, like in
'
85 when I wanted to convert to Catholicism
in Apizaco Mexico because I was obsessed with the
glow-in-the-dark crucifixes
sold outside the church, I wanted to buy as many as I could to sell to
Madonna fans in Boston but felt it would only be appropriate to convert first.
As I toyed with the idea, the idea grew until I could feel generations of Aztecs
pass through me when an old woman brushed my shoulder after prayer. Finally
one evening, after feeling embarrassed about buying yet one more glow-cross
from the same guy five days in a row, I stuffed it in my pants, it began to glow, I felt it,
my abdomen abuzz, my first look at a Victoria's Secret catalog, ten, alone in the bath.
For all I know God is in lunch, during Ramadan we chose God over lunch for a month.
At sixteen I walked into La Grande Mosquée and announced I wanted to convert to
Islam.
They asked me to say
Allah ila haa Mohammedan rasulullah,
so I did.
They said,
There ya go, you're a moslem.
Yes, it felt anti-climactic even in French.
Then again, celebrating Eid a year later with two thousand other moslems
in the foothills of the Himalayas in un-self-conscious synchronicity was proof
that Allah passes through all of us, with each transfer of spirit, unknown energies
are more palpable. Many times that year I had out-of-body experiences
to the point where I could see myself in context and realized I looked
as post-colonial as the Aussie hippy in Haridwar, saffron robes, beads
and bald head tonguing down his girl in front of Maya Devi Temple.
I will tell you this, one week after my brother died I saw something in the sky
(no, I won't tell you what it was) that affirmed my belief that everything,
every faith, myth, superstition, miracle, rumor, conspiracy, cult, self-help program,
everything, all of it is true.
Truth: I have never apologized for my own skin before,
for the way Newark bends me like sunrise
gleaming through bus windows
or the way I let myself go like doves at the matrimony of fate and free will.
Tell me this is the way things fall apart.
Truth: My ex-significant lover walked out of Buddy Wakefield's feature last night on the
premise that God lives in North Carolina between the eye of a needle and the thread
weaving Aesop's fables together. He claims to have a keen ability to detect heresy and,
apparently, lynch mobs don't need rope or melanin before.
Lie: I am to blame.
Lie: A legacy of shame on the underbelly of a nation can be remedied
with
handshakes and convenient silence.
Truth: There are times when I am insecure in my humanity,
in the way my
body contorts and bleeds to keep this universe in balance.
Truth: Prejudice is the only way we've learned to box our own shadows,
saints whose
halos are one photon short of revealing themselves.
Truth: God could exist in the air,
blowing string-theory daffodils into the
nothingness without a care.
Would our trespasses be any less holy?
Dare-
tell me what your God looks like
sitting on a crumbling mountain of misdeeds
and
family trees bending in the wind.
Tell me how he learned to hate his own shadow,
how he taught his
spitting
images
to split and
splinter