Why do Black men have to be so angry?
I wondered how to not tell them that grinnin’,
dancin’, singin’ and callin’ on Jesus only go so far.
A real Black man’s hurt where they cannot see,
or how he learns to cleverly hides his scars.

i have swam with the mind's eels of mediterranean opuses
i have meditated on andean precipices on finities & infinities of being & seeing
hidden in plain sight these realms appear before me untouched by mind
​uninhibited by mind unfractured by mind unspun by mind

“Kill the Indian, save the man,” they proclaimed.
Sent off on trains to faraway places,
hair shorn (was mother dead?), uniforms issued,
home languages silenced with slaps,

I had a feral streak and that day when the ice cream truck passed by I ran out of the house, straight into a big sedan driving down the street. I bounced off the side right by the front wheel.

dutch-drugdeal-

er-defenes-

trating-chet-bak-

er-like

“Three strikes and you're out,” he says in whispers behind the scenes.
Out on the street, no job, no way home.
Permanent as a bronze statue, ripping young from their loving families;
A sickly angel, hiding among the crowds outside my favorite gay bar.

A Ukrainian army combat medic who
was decorating her new apartment in Kyiv
with pink carpets and fluffy curtains,
now sleeps in the basement of
a building converted into the headquarters
​for the Territorial Defense Forces,

Baudelaire and Freud liked to get into the Silver Sands Tavern around six, before all the tickets for Crazy Tuesday Chase the Ace were gone and they missed out on winning the meat-pack.

Do not kill a mountain
scooping out its ribs to find
its lungs, organs and thread, ribbon
of bright.  If you do,
​you will unknot the growl

I imagine your dark fingers combing through graying hair. The baths, the fat sponge squeezed over chest & leg of bastard & benevolent alike. The nervous questions. The pills, the concentrated orange juice, the cup of fruit, the trays. The apologies of the incontinent.

The bunny person takes off their head like a series of Russian nesting dolls, over and over again. Unexplainably, each time, beneath the previous head is the same head, the same size, the same texture. How do they all fit?

rest your bones by the fire, hang your flesh by the door
wind hasn’t the strength to come in, muscles would unfurl
and spread from wall to wall but bones want to be legible
through the cloud ceilings, when angelic satellites
come to identify us and hollow our bones so we can fly

We made hours to have something
to count, so dying is another
name for productivity. Clean
​as you go so you have time to dread

As Howard gathered bags of marijuana and Etienne’s expensive
     New scale
That he had stolen from Lady Snow’s,
I smeared my blood on the walls in a detached, tongue-in-cheek
​     Gesture,

Tiffany and the Nimrod took their first night in a motel just past the truck stop, in a scarlet and white bridal suite. The motel had plastic furniture in the lobby, and “Jesus loves you,” graffitied on the condom machine in the public restroom.

I want to dazzle off to a repetitive indulgence that transforms particulates into a wave of luster that defines who we will be.

                 meaning to hit,
                                      to pound with force,
                   to bring into collision,
to utterly demolish. The poem often exists to remind us that it too must be destroyed.

there once was a brutality
soaked engine that engulfed
the world in its flames
& everyone rejoiced