not to play me that way?
(The way I pray to be played.)
Mama say the Lord enters you in stages
(Play me that way)
First like a lit match under your skin
(Play me that way)
Then like an animal biting through bone with soft teeth
(Play me)
Mama say lie still and wait for glory
(that way)
to consume me
(that way)
Press my keys
(that way)
Press my keys
(that way)
Don't pay me no mind, lover.
I always shudder
when I pray.
for Philip
She is unnerved, anxious
at the state of the world,
but he insists that she uncoil.
The fluorescent light overhead
leaves her stretched bare,
vaguely ashamed of the ease
with which she's been translated.
In her language, exclamations
are held in the mouth
until they are too weak to escape.
They are both the children
of their absent fathers. His dad
was a sleek guitar neck,
hers a gritty dollop of Delta
cocky behind the steering of a car
propped up on northern wheels.
Their fathers are the dead
puppeteers who push them
toward one another
then pull them apart,
who jerk tangled strings
and teach them the blues out loud.
It will be hard to recall a time
when they were exactly
what they are now,
poised to become all of it
in spite of themselves.
His singing burns
like the blue sun
inked on his forearm.
She fully intends one word
to turn the earth's heart.
Such merriment
as the fathers watch their children.
They're those cackling, unruly ghosts
taking up no space at all in the third row,
the ones who tipped in
when the room's back was turned.
Guffawing until Camel spittle
and penny whiskey
spew from their grins,
they bob bony noggins
to the blue grind
and sing along.
They love that their offspring
waste their time so valiantly,
shapeshifting,
offering their verse and voltage
to crowds of solemn drunks,
hanging for all they're worth
to one cracking point of a star.
The Nigerian women smeared
a thick line of Texaco's oil
under each eye, warrior warnings,
then crouched low and sprang
with the boulders of their bodies,
their stout ashy legs and mad wrists,
holding their paper banners with words
scratched out and respelled:
Give work to our husbands,
our brothers, our sons.
Give us light and water,
or pack now.
The pure singular force
of themselves.
Their glorious damnable throats.
You remember. Pack now.
Remember.
My son, budding dreadhead, has taken a break from obsessively twisting and waxing his naps, swelling his delts, and busting rhymes with no aim, backbeat, or future beyond the common room. For want of a plumper canteen, the child has laid claim to a jailhouse vocation.
I'm the writer, Mama,
he tells me.
That's what I'm known for in here.
In my kitchen, clutching the receiver, I want to laugh, because my son has
always
been the writer, muttering witness to the underbelly, his rebel heart overthumping, his bladed lines peppered with ready-market gangster swerve and cringing in awe of themselves. I want to laugh, but
I must commit to my focus. I must be typical, single, black, with an 18-to-30-year-old male child behind bars. How deftly I have learned the up/back of that tiring Watusi.
I guess it's a poem,
he'd mutter.
Throw it away if you want.
And oh, I'd ache at what he'd done, the bottoms he'd found, the clutch he claimed on what refused to be held, the queries scraped from surface.
What are you chile?,
I'd whisper as I read. Could there be a dream just temporarily deferred wallowing in those drooping denims and triple-x sweats, could there be a poet wrapped tight against the world in those swaddling clothes?
He was the writer then, but now, reluctant resident of the Middlesex County House of Correction, he is
the
writer, sanctioned by the baddest of badasses because he has trumpeted the power of twisting verb and noun not only to say things, but to
get
shit:
They paying me to write love letters to their ladies.
I write poems if they rather have that,
this one big musclehead brother everybody be sweatin
even asked me to write a letter to his mama on her birthday.
They call him Scribe.
They bring him their imploded dreams, letters from their women-in-waiting tired of waiting. On deadline, he spins impossible sugar onto the precise lines of legal pads, pens June/moon dripping enough to melt a b-girl's hard heart. He drops to scarred knees, moans and whimpers in stilted verse, coaxing last ink from a passed-around ballpoint, making it wail:
please please babygirl,
don't be talking about not waiting out my time,
only five years left, that ain't much,
hey Scribe, Scribe, hook me up, man,
I ain't got no answer for this shit she sudden talkin.
Tattooed in riotous colors, they circle him in the common room, whispering to him beneath the surface of their reputations:
Got a job for you Scribe, got a job.
When the letters are crafted just right, copied over and over and edited for the real, the customers stumble through the aloud reading of them, scared of their own new voices. Too dazzled to demand definition, they scrunch scarred foreheads and whistle through gold caps at the three-syllable kickverbs:
I'm gon' trust you,
they tell my son.
I'm gon' trust you on this.
They don't want their softness. They don't want it.
You know, Scribe, damn, damn this shit SINGS!
You blessed man, you blessed.
I don't know what you saying man, but it sho sound good.
So I'm gon' trust you. I'm gon' trust you on this.
Then they copy the words in their own hand and send spun silk shoutouts to the freewalking world, hoping that a disillusioned girlfriend or a neglected mother or a wife-in-waiting tired of waiting will slit open the envelope and feel a warm repentant soul spill out into her hands.
And I must admit, as a fellow poet, I envy my son, this being necessary. Think of it. Which of us would refuse to try on the first face of a killer, our life teetering on every line? Wouldn't we want to craft a new front for everyone just once, to rewrite one moment of a life story, to beg for mercy on behalf of someone who has never known life on his knees?
And at the end of our flowery betrayal, that white-heat moment of no sound. In the steamy pocket of it, all we'd need is one person rising up slow, full of spit and menace, to say:
O.K.
,
O.K.
, I'm gon' trust you on that one.
I'm gon' have to trust you on that.
And this time there's trouble.
Whistle-toothed carnies
blow their wretched sugar
into strained balloons of blood.
God's beasts, inflamed and loony
in unlatched cages, fuck furiously
across all speciesâlion with grizzly,
ape with his keeper.
The alligator woman claws at a hell
of skin, listens to her cunt snap shut,
and shrieks at what the moon has told her.
The baby floating in a jar lists to the left,
bumps its head hard against the glass,
slowly reveals a worming eye. The vague
chaos brings a smile to his swirling.
And I am standing on an old roller coaster
whipping through the dark. A sculpted lion's
head leers from the first car, one marbled eye
lost long ago to wind. No ropes, belts, or bars
bind my body. There is nothing to keep me
from flying loose and slamming against that
building with its ghostly cadre of bumper cars.
The ragged clack of my rises and dips disturb
and intrigue the growl-faced boy and the woman
balancing her sex on three misshapen legs.
Their milky, eager eyes flap locked,
turn up, upward.
I do not fall,
and this amazes me, amazes them.
Yet still I go faster,
the speed biting holes in my hair,
whittling scream to whisper,
blurring tempera clown leers.
The damned thing squeals up, up,
hugging the rickety matchstick track,
ribboning the sheet of grease-scented dark.
Up this insanely, the air boasts a simple pain,
and I gulp breath as feverishly
as the alligator girl scratches her skin
to find a soft, definite history beneath.
Watch me.
Watch along with the limber,
the slithering,
the toothless,
the doomed.
Dance in gleeful anticipation
of my plummet to the midway.
Stand by until I have fallen.
Let the freaks sniff out the parts they need.
Then separate the splinters of wood
from those of bone.
for Girl X, Chicago
The first thing we took away was your name.
We erased the bleak shame from each syllable,
blurred the image of your tiny body broken into
network sound bytes, snippets of videotape
with a swollen face x-ed out.
x
               Â
as in she is no longer a good girl.
x
               Â
as in two simple lines crossing
where a beating heart should be.
You were little, like we don't want to remember.
You were stutter-folded, you were beaten liquid
on those lonely stairs, your skin was slashed,
you were raped with a fist and sticks, insecticide
sprayed into your seeing and down the tunnel of
your throat. He must have held your mouth open,
stretching the circle, leaving moons in your lip.
The violation left you blind and without tongue,
wrecked the new clock of you. You were jump rope
in double time and pigeon-toed, navy blue Keds
with round toes and soles like paper, jelly sandwiches
and grape smash fingers, you, ashy-kneed rose,
missing rib, splintered and flinching through
a death sleep. In which direction do we pray?
To recreate you, they relied on ritual.
Weeping nurses gently parted your hair, the teeth
of the comb tipped in rubber, and dried blood
showered from your scalp like chips of paint.
They rubbed warm oil through the unraveling braids,
threaded ribbon through to the ends.
We will give you back your life
by pretending you are still alive.