These poems, they are things that I do in the dark, reaching for you, whoever you are, and are you ready? These words, they are stones in the water, running away. These skeletal lines, they are desperate arms for my longing and love. I am a stranger learning to worship the strangers around me.
Whoever you are, whoever I may become. July 4th, 1974. At least it helps me to think about my son, a Leo born to us, Aries and Cancer, some 16 years ago in St. John's Hospital next to the Long Island Railroad tracks, Atlantic Avenue. Brooklyn, New York, at dawn. Which facts do not really prepare you, do they, for him, angry, serious, and running through the darkness with his own becoming light.
This poem was written for my father in his memory. Poem for Granville Ivanhoe Jordan. At the top of your tie, the dressy maroon number with one small gravy stain remaining. The knot is now too narrow for your neck. A ridiculous, a dust-free, shiny box confines your arm.
and legs accustomed to a boxer's hunch of wrestlers hauling energies at partial rest. Three or four AM a thousand nights who stubbornly retrieved your own into illumination. Bright beyond blind filing of a million letters at the post office which never forwarded even one of a hundred fantasies your kitchen kept plans keeping you awake. West Indian in kitchen exile alone between the days and studying the National Geographic magazines recording middle-class white explorations and excitement in the places you were forced to leave no shoes no teeth but ox-like shoulders and hazel eyes that watered slightly from the reading you did teach yourself to do West Indian in kitchen exile omnivorous consumer of thick kitchen table catalogs of seeds for sale for red bright flower seeds slick and colorful on the quick lush pages advertising pear and apple trees or peaches in first bloom who saved for money orders for the flowers for the trees who used a spade and shovel heavily and well to plant the brooklyn backyard innocent of all the succulent The gorgeous schemes you held between your fingers like a simple piece of paper. Jesus, Daddy, what did you expect?
An orange grove, a eucalyptus, roses from the cities that despised the sweet calypso of your trust. Who stole the mustache from your face? It's gone. Who took it away? Why did you stop there on your knees at 84?
A man down on your knees in inconceivable but willing prayer. Your life God's baby in gray hair. What pushed you from your own two feet, my father? To this you have come. A calm, a concrete pit contains your corpse.
Above the spume spent ending of the surf. Against the mountain trees and fertile pitch of steeply clinging dirt. Sleep on, beloved, take thy rest. The minister, eyes bare beneath the island light, intones a feeling mumbo-jumbo, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
The village men, wrists strained to lumped-up veins and cartilage from carrying the casket, do not pray, they do not sing. Abide with me, fast falls the eventide. It's afternoon.
It's hot, it's lit by sun that cannot be undone by death. I wrote two poems in the persona of Valentine Jones, who's partly me and partly somebody. But anyhow, this is the first one from the talking back of Miss Valentine Jones.
Well, I... I wanted to braid my hair, bathe and bedeck myself so fine, so fully a forethought for your pleasure, see. I wanted to travel and read and run around fantastic into war and peace. I wanted to surf, dive, fly, climb, conquer, and be conquered. Then I wanted to pick up the phone and find you asking me if I might possibly be alone some night so I could answer cool as the jewels I would wear on bare skin for your dig-me-daddy delectation. when you coming over.
But I had to remember to write down margarine on the list and shoe polish and a can of sliced pineapples in case of company and a quart of skim milk, cause Teresa's gaining weight and don't nobody groove on that much, girl. And next I had to sort for darks and lights before the laundry hit the water, which I had to kind of keep an eye on, because if the big hose jumps the sink again, that Mrs. Thompson going to come upstairs and brain me with a mop don't smell too nice. Even though she hangin'headfirst out the window And I had to check on William Like to burn himself to death with fever Boy so thin, be callin'all day Mama, sing to me Ma, am I gonna die?
And me not wake enough to sit beside him longer Than to wipe away the sweat Or change the sheets, his shirt And feed him orange juice before I fall asleep And sweet my Jesus, ain't but one can left And we not through the afternoon And now you temporarily showing up with a thing you say is a poem and you call it Will the real Miss Black America stand up? Guilty gratitude bone mouth about Doody beauties of my head rack Boozed up doozies about Never mind cause love is blind Well I can't use it And the very next bodacious black man Call me queen because my life ain't shit Because in any case He ain't been here to share it with me dish for dish and do for do and dream for dream I'm gonna scream him out my house because what I wanted was to braid my hair bathe and bedeck myself so fully because what I wanted was your love not pity because what I wanted was your love your love poem number two from the talking back of Ms. Valentine Jones The war is over. And the small fry, little folks, land-eyed devils, gooks, the fertile peril, yellow fellow travelers, they've won. The victory, the liberation of the Indo-Chinese peoples, apparently belongs to pint-sized, short, slight, run-hard armies not excluding ten-year-olds, boy and girl guerrilla fireflies, a multi-thousand-fold, an army marching on and on in sixty-nine-cent single-thong slippers, thin loose pajamas, a military presence fortified by a handful of rice. Wild fruit and the indomitable sexy instinct, sexy sting of freedom.
Want that thing, that mighty sweet thing so my soul can sing. Want freedom, freedom, freedom. Want my freedom now.
There go the Imperial Big Nose Eagles, flown and blown back, where'd it come from? Look at them go, a-slippin'and a-slidin', a-tippin'and a-hidin'and hardly a-float, and doin'a desperate flip-floppin'wing down to the nearest Red Cross rescue boat. Look at them go, the Imperial Big Nose Eagles, flyin'low enough to crawl.
Crawl, eagle, crawl, wipe your weepy eyes. Turn to the west, my darling, fly the friendly skies. Long distance is cheaper than you think.
Look at them go. The war is over. In Wanlok, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, and Ho Chi Minh City, there are no people, babies, lovers, widows, mothers, brothers, in-laws, children, who belong to, who survive, who grieve for the crew-cut losers of the war. The Eagle Eye anti-personnel missionaries took no land, nation, village, school, hospital, home, garden plot, or rice field with them when they split.
However, Authorities attribute these remaining items to the big nose foreigners. Five pounds ground round, frozen orange juice, a watch that runs underwater, filter-tipped cigarettes and a case of Coca-Cola and that's all. Think small, the war is over. This myopic personage, pimply where she wish she bloomin'freckles, tell me, smack in the middle of the giant cockeyed suckers truckin'us into the ground. Squeezing heads to the size of the sides of a dime.
Smack then, when everybody hurt for open free meals and open free schools and open free ways to a job and open free dreams of the future. When the men drink whiskey from brown bags on the day-long corner places they don't ever leave. Oh, I need me something I can do.
You need me something I can do. Well, I have some kind of shoes, but still I got the blues. Well, I have some kind of food, but it don't really taste too good. Smack then and there, this myopic person, and she tell me.
They don't look like students. They don't act like students. It drives me crazy.
They come do wow, ooh, ooh, uh-oh, baby, playing those Japanese portable radios loud so you can't hear nothing worthwhile or think or carry on a proper conversation or, for God's sake, read a book. That's why I say, honestly, Valentine, we have only ourselves to blame. Black folk got only themselves to blame.
You don't see no white kids carrying no radios, do you? I say, maybe they don't have no radio. My man, Emmanuel Addis Adababoo Owens, he say, maybe they don't have no need to dance through streets of fire.
Lady, buy a radio. Turn it up. Turn it on.
On and on. On and on. Turn it up.
Don't want to hear you or be near you. You the problem. You the dry spot in the holy water. You the freeze-ass imitation enemy, he say.
Lady, buy a radio. The writing's on the wall. Dear somebody. I am unhappy.
My boyfriend is a creep. He makes me sick. What should I do? Nobody likes me besides him either. You should talk over with him how he's a creep and tell him how you feel about that.
Maybe he thinks you're a creep too. How do you know? Find out. I am not a lesbian, but I would like to have a real experience with a girl who is. What should I do?
Believe it or not, Jesus is the answer. Join the church. The Lord will save you a lot of trouble and keep you busy on the weekends. Boycott the Bicentennial.
My man say, if I don't give him a baby boy, he will throw me out or beat me to death. Tell him to fuck himself, don't he like girls? I'm telling you, baby, the war's now hardly over for anyone like me.
We got a long way to go before we get to where we need to be. Don't have no work, don't have no work, can't find no job. The streets is mean, the streets is mean, and my ship ain't nowhere to be seen.
The war's now hardly over. Want that thing, that mighty sweet thing, so my soul can sing. Want freedom, freedom, freedom. Want my freedom now.
In Africa, in Mozambique, Angola, liberation lifts the glowing head of the young girl formerly burdened by laundry and yams. She straps the baby to her back, and next she carries her rifle like she means means to kill for the love, for the life of us all. Sunflower Sonnet Number Two Supposing we could just go on and on as two, Voracious in the days apart as well as when we side by side, The many ways we do that well, I would consider then perfection possible or else worthwhile to think about, Which is to say, I guess the costs of long term tend to pile up, Block and complicate, Erase away the accidental temporary near thing pulse beat promises one makes because the chance The easy new is there in front of you, but still Perfection takes some sacrifice of falling stars for rare and there are stars But none of you to spare poem for inaugural rose Wanting to stomp down 8th Avenue snow or no snow where you might be so we can take over the evening by taxi, by kerosene lamp, by literal cups of tea, that you love me.
Wanting to say, Jesus, I'm glad, and I am not calm, not calm, but I am shy, and shy is short on reach and wide on bowing out. It's in against the flint and deep irradiation of this torso. listing to the phosphorescence of French windows in the bells your hair, the forehead of the morning of your face, a clear, a calm decision of the light to gather there, and you, an obstinate and elegant nail-bitten hand on quandaries of self-correction, self-perfection, as political as building your own bed to tell the truth and your waste. As narrow as the questions you insist upon palpate, expose, immense, Not knowing any of the words to say okay or wrong, and my wanting to say, wanting to show and tell, bells, okay, because I'm shy, but I will not lie to you. In my life there is much love, and in my work there are many love poems.
This one is called On Your Love. Beloved, where I have been, if you loved me more than your own and God's soul, you could not have lifted me out of the water or lit even one of the cigarettes I stood smoking alone. Beloved, what I have done... if you discounted the devil entirely and rejected the truth as a rumor you would turn from the heat of my face that burns under your lips beloved what i have dreamed if you ended the fevers and riot the claw and the whale and the absolute furious dishevel of my unkempt mind you could never believe the quiet your arms make true around me Wasted.
You should slice the lying tongue of your love into a billion bits of bile you swallow, one bilious element at a time, while scalding water trembles drop by drop between you hope, between your eyes, because you said you loved me and you lied, you lied. All you wanted was to rid me of my pride, to ruin me for tenderness, you lied, to thrust me monstrous from the hurt you fabricated. Claiming all the opposites of pain while maiming me, the victim of your whimsical disdain.
And I still love you like the river in the rain. In vain you lied, in vain. Poem for my pretty man. The complexity is like your legs, around me simple, an entanglement and strong, the sready curling hair, the brown skin tones of action, quiet, temporarily like listening, serene and passionate, and slowly closer, slowly closer, kissing inch by inch. Niagara Falls.
And in the first place, the flowing of the river went about its business like a hulking shallows curling ankle deep to spew. And in the second place, the flowing river fell and falling fell stupendous down a breakneck cliff invisible behind the cataclysmic streaming burst apart at bottom into spray that birds attempted to delay by calmly playing in the serpentine formations of the frothing aftermath, and then in my place stood a fool surprised by power that wins only peace as when the sliding clouds collide into a new perfection quietly. The last poem I read was about power and so is this one which I wrote about Richard Milhouse Nixon about a year and a half before people started talking about impeachment.
And this is called poem on moral leadership as a political dilemma. I don't know why, but I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree. I did, I did that yesterday. I chopped down the cherry tree.
And to tell you the truth, see, that was only in the morning, which left a whole day and part of an evening until suppertime to continue doing what I like to do about cherry trees, which is... to chop them down. Then pick the cherries and roll them into a cherry pie circle, and then stomp the cherries, stomp them, jumping up and down hard and heavy, jumping up to stomp them so the flesh leaks and the juice runs loose. And then I get to pick at the pits, or else I pick up the cherry pits, depending on my mood.
And then I fill my mouth completely full of cherry pits and run over to the river, the Potomac, where I spit the cherry pits. 47 to 65 cherry pits spit into the Potomac at one spit. And to tell you the truth some more, if I ever see a cherry tree standing around no matter where, and here, let me please be perfectly clear, no matter where I see a cherry tree standing around, even if it belongs to a middle American of moderate means, with a two-car family that is falling apart, In a respectable, civilized, falling apart, mind your manners, manner, even then, or even if you happen to be corporate rich, or unspeakably poor, or famous, or fashionably thin, or comfortably fat, or even as peculiar as misguided as a Democrat, or even a Democrat, even then, see, if you have a cherry tree and I see it, I will chop that cherry tree down, stomp the cherries, fill my mouth completely with the pits to spit them into the Potomac. And I don't know why it is that I cannot tell a lie, but that's the truth.
Poem on a New Year's Eve. This is a poem that I wrote in response, among other things, to the first ersatz energy crisis. Infinity doesn't interest me, not altogether anymore. I crawl and kneel and grub about.
I beg and listen for what can go away as easily as love or perish. like the children running hard on one-way streets. Infinity doesn't interest me.
Not anymore. Not even repetition. You're my eyelid or the colorings of sunrise or all the sky excitement added up is not enough to satisfy this lusting adulation that I feel for your brown arm before it moves, moves, changes up. The temporary sacred tales ago, first bike ride round the house when you first saw a squad opossum carry babies on her back, opossum up in the persimmon tree, you reeling toward that natural first absurdity with so much wonder, still it shakes your voice. The temporary is the sacred, takes me out.
And even the stars and even the snow and even the rain do not amount to much unless these things submit to some disturbance, some derangement, such as when I yield myself belonging to your unmistaken body. And let the powerful lock up the canyon mountain peaks, the hidden rivers waterfalls, the deep down minerals, the coal field gold fields diamond mines close by the whoring or hot at the center of the earth spinning fast as numbers i cannot imagine let the world blot obliterate remove so-called magnificence so-called almighty fathomless and everlasting treasures wealth whatever that may be it is this time that matters it is this history i care about the one we make together, awkward, inconsistent as a lame cat on the loose, or quick as kids freed by the bell, or else as strictly once, as only life must mean a once upon a time. I have rejected propaganda teaching me about the beautiful, the truly rare.
Supposedly the soft push of the ocean at the hush point of the shore, Supposedly, the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore is beautiful, for instance, but the truly rare can stay out there. I have rejected that abstraction, that enormity, unless I see a dog walk on the beach, a bird sees sand flies, or yourself approach me, laughing out a sound to spoil the pretty picture, make an uncontrolled heart-beating memory instead. I read the papers preaching on that oil and oxygen, that redwoods and the evergreens, that trees, the waters, and the atmosphere compile a final listing of the world in short supply.
But all alive and all the lives persist, perpetual in jeopardy, persist as scarce as every one of us, as difficult to find or keep, as irreplaceable as... frail as every one of us and as i watch your arm your brown arm just before it moves i know all things are dear that disappear all things are dear that disappear Poem after reading the number one intellectual American bestseller Future Shock all about change is where we're at. Well, number two, baby, is that change ain't nowhere you can hold on. Now read that, now read this.
Gone, gone, Eddie, gone, Greg, gone, Julius, Millen, Peter, Alice, Francis, Terry, gone, aunt, uncle, cousins, niece and nephew, father, mother, son, gone, gone, Dale, Primus, Clarence, Ross, gone, gone, give me no garbage about, this is the future, speed up, travel, turn around, make it mobile, hit the road, shit, I'm just tired, saying goodbye. Poem about my rights. Even tonight, and I need to take a walk and clear my head about this poem about why I can't go out without changing my clothes, my shoes, my body posture, my morning and evening alone on the streets. alone not being the point the point being that i can't do what i want to do with my own body because i am the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin here in the city but down on the woods and i wanted to about the wood by the stars and the silence not think and i could not stay the alone because i was my own body and who is and in france they say if the guy penetrates but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me and if after screams if after begging the bastard and if even after smashing a hammer to his head if even after that if he and his buddies me after that if he and his buddies me then i consented and there was no rape because finally they me over because i was wrong i was wrong again to be me being me where i was wrong to be who i am god damned wrong which is exactly like south africa penetrating as it were into namibia penetrating into angola and does that mean i mean how do you know if pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on black land and if after namibia and if after angola and if after zimbabwe and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to self-immolation of the villages and if after that we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they claim my consent Do you follow me?
We are the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent, and what in the hell is everybody being reasonable about? And according to the Times this week, back in 1966, the CIA decided that they had this problem. and the problem was a man named Nkrumah, so they killed him. And before that, it was Patrice Lumumba.
And before that, it was my father on the campus of my Ivy League school, and my father afraid to walk into the cafeteria because he said he was wrong. the wrong age, the wrong skin, the wrong gender identity, and he was paying my tuition. And before that, it was my father saying I was wrong, saying that I should have been a boy because he wanted one, a boy, and that I should have been lighter skinned, and that I should have had straighter hair, and that I should not be so boy crazy, but instead I should just be one, a boy. And before that, it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for my nose and braces for my teeth.
and telling me to let the books loose, let them loose. In other words, I am very familiar with the problems of the CIA and the problems of South Africa and the problems of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white America in general and the problems of the teachers and the preachers and the FBI and the social workers and my particular mom and dad. I am very familiar with the problems because the problems turn out to be me. I am the history of rape. I am the history of the rejection of who I am.
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of myself. I am the history of battery assault and limitless armies against whatever I want to do with my mind and my body and my soul. And whether it's about walking out at night, or whether it's about the love that I feel, or whether it's about the sanctity of my vagina, or the sanctity of my national boundaries, or the sanctity of my leaders, or the sanctity of each and every desire that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic and indisputably single and singular heart, I have been raped because I have been wrong.
The wrong sex, the wrong age, the wrong skin, the wrong nose, the wrong hair. the wrong need, the wrong dream, the wrong geographic, the wrong sartorial. I have been the meaning of rape.
I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by force. This poem is not consent. I do not consent. To my mother, to my father, to the teachers, to the FBI, to South Africa, to Bedford-Stuy, to Park Avenue, to American Airlines, to the hard-on idlers on the corners, to the sneaky creeps in cars, I am not wrong. Wrong is not my name.
My name is my own. my own, my own. And I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this, but I can tell you that from now on, my resistance, my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life.
This poem is called Unemployment Monologue. You can call me Herbie Jr. or Ashima Kazam, it don't matter much. The thing is, you don't want my name, you want a mugshot. Young, black male, who scares you chicken shit, just standing on the street, just looking at you pass me by.
But I ain't doing nothing and you know it. And if you call me Herbie, I don't mind, or Junior, that's alright. Or Ashima Kazam, that's cool. I say, it don't really matter much.
And then again, see, I may call you Sweet Meat. I may call you tight ass. I might one night I might break the windows of the house you live in.
I might get tight and take your wallet out of sight. I might hide out in the park to chase you in the dark, etc. It don't matter. I may stay in school or quit and I say it don't matter much. You want a mugshot and the way I feel about it, well, so what?
You got it. Poem for Nana. What will we do?
When there is nobody left to kill, 40,000 gallons of oil gushing into the ocean, but I sit on top this mountainside above the Pacific, checking out the flowers, the California poppies orange as I meet myself in heat. I'm wondering, where is the Indians? All this film strip territory, all this cowboy saga land, not a single Indian in sight. 40,000 gallons gushing up poison from the deepest seabeds every hour. 40,000 gallons while experts international while new pollutants swallow the unfathomable.
Still, no Indians. I'm staring hard around me, past the pinks, the poppies, and the precipice that let me see the wide Pacific, unsuspecting, even trivial, by virtue of its vast surrender. I am a woman searching for her savagery, even if it's doomed.
Where are the Indians? Crow nose, little bear, slim girl, black elk, fox belly. The people of the sacred trees and rivers precious to the stars that told old stories to the night. How do we follow after them? Falling snow before the firelight and buffalo as brothers to the man.
How do we follow into that? They found her face down where she would be dancing to the shadow drums that humble birds to silent flight. They found her body held, its life dispelled by ice my life burns to destroy.
Aname piktu akwash, slain on the trail of broken treaties, bullet lodged in her brain, hands and fingertips dismembered. who won the only peace that cannot pass from mouth to mouth. And memory should agitate the pierced bone crack of one in pushed back horror, pushed back pain as when I call out looking for my face among the wounded coins to toss about or out entirely the legends of Geronimo of Pocahontas now become a squat pedestrian cement.
inside the tomb of all my trust, as when I feel you isolate among the hungers of the trees, a trembling hidden tinder so long unsolicited by flame, as when I accept my sister dead when there should be instead a fluid holiness of spirits wrapped around the world redeemed by women whispering communion. I find my way by following your spine. Your heart, indivisible from my real wish, we compel the moon into the evening when you said, No, I will not let go of your hand. Now I am diving for a tide to take me everywhere. Below, The soft Pacific spoils, a purple girdling of the globe impregnable.
Last year, the South African Minister of Justice described anti-government disturbances as, quote, part of a worldwide trend toward the breakdown of established political and cultural orders, unquote. God knows, I hope he's right. This poem is called, I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies, and it's dedicated to the poet Agostino Neto, who is the president of the People's Republic of Angola.
I will no longer lightly walk behind a one of you who fear me. Be afraid. I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits and facial tics.
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore, and this is dedicated in particular to those who hear my footsteps or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery cart, then turn around, see me, and hurry on away from this impressive terror I must be. I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon surrounded by my comrades singing terrible revenge in merciless accelerating rhythms, but I have watched a blind man studying his face. I have set the table in the evening and sat down to eat the news.
Regularly, I have gone to sleep. There is no one to forgive me. The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover who drops her dime into the phone just as the subway shakes into the station, wasting her message, canceling the question of her call. Fulminating or forgetful but late. And always after the fact that could save or condemn me, I must become the action of my fate.
How many of my brothers and my sisters will they kill before I teach myself retaliation? Shall we pick a number? South Africa, for instance.
Do we agree that more than 10,000 in less than a year, but that less than 5,000 slaughtered in more than six months? Well, what is the matter with me? I must become a menace to my enemies, and if I, if I ever let you slide, who should be extirpated from my universe, who should be cauterized from earth completely, law and order jerk-offs of the first, the terrorist degree, then let my body fail my soul in its bedeviled lecheries, and if I, if I ever let love go, because the hatred and the whisperings become A phantom dictate I obey in lieu of impulse and realities. The blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees then let love freeze me out. I must become, I must become a menace to my enemies.
Getting down to get over, dedicate to my mother. Mama, mama, mama, mama, mama, mammy, nanny, granny, woman, mistress, sister, love, black girl, slave girl, gal, honey child, sweet stuff, sugar, sweetheart, baby, baby, baby, mama, mama, black mama, black bitch, black pussy, piece of tail, nice piece of ass, hey daddy, hey bro, we walk together and talk together and dance and do together, dance and do, hey daddy, bro, hey Nina, Nikki, Noni, Noma, Noma, mama, black mama, Black woman, black female, head of household, black matriarchal matriarchy, black statistical, low life, low level, low down, low down, and up to be low down, black statistical, low factor, factotum, factitious, fictitious, figment, figurine, low down, lying, annual reports. Black woman, black hallelujah, saintly, patient, smiling, humble, giving thanks for annual reports and monthly dole and Friday night and good God, Monday morning, black and female.
Marta Masakis, a big white lie. Mama, mama. What does motherfucking mean?
Who's the motherfucker? Fuck my mama. Messed yours over and right now.
Be tripping on my star black female soul. A Mack truck motherfucker. The first primordial. The paradigmatic dogmatistic motherfucker. Who is he?
Hey, mama, mama. Dry eyes on the shy, dark, hidden, crying black face of the loneliness. The rape. The broke up mailbox. And no Western Union roses come inside the kitchen And no poem take you through the whole night And no big black burly hand be holding yours to have to hold on to No big black burly hand, no no more No black prince come ridin'from the darkness on a beautiful black horse.
No bro, no daddy. I was 16 when I met my father in a bar in Baltimore. He told me who he was and what he does. Pay for the drinks. I looked, I listened, and I left him.
It was civil perfectly and absolute bullshit. The drinks was leaking water weak and never got down to my knees. Hey daddy, what they been and done to you?
And what you been and done to me too, mama, mama, mama. Hey, sugar daddy, big daddy, sweet daddy, black daddy. The original father divine.
The ever-loving, deep, tall, bad, buck, jive, cold, strut, bop, split, tight, loose, close. Hot, hot, hot, sweet, sweet daddy. Where you been and when you coming back to me?
Hey, when you coming back to mama, mama, mama. And suppose he finally say, look, baby, I loves me some everything about you. Let me be your man.
Thy reach around a hurtin'like a dream and I ain't never wakin'up from that one. Mama, mama, mama, mama, too. Consider the queen. Hand on her hip, sweat restin'from the corn bean greens feel steamy under the pale sly suffocatin', son. Consider the queen.
She fix the cufflinks on his Sunday shirt and fry some chicken, bake some cake and tell the family... Never mind about the boss man don't know how a human being's supposed to act. Just never mind about him. Wash your face, sit down, and let the good Lord bless this table.
Consider the queen. Her baby's pulling at the nipples, pulling at the mama milk. The infant fingers gingerly approach caress the soft black swollen mama breast.
And there, inside the mama's soft life-spilling treasure chest, the heart... breaks rage by grief by sorrow weary weary breaks breaks quiet silently the weary sorrow quiet now the furious the adamant the broken busted beaten down and beaten up the beaten beaten beaten weary heart beats tender steady and the babies suck the seed of blood and love glows at the soft black swollen mama breast consider the queen she works when she works in the laundry in jail in the schoolhouse in jail in the office in jail on the soapbox in jail on the desk on the floor on the street on the line at the door looking fine at the head of the line stepping sharp from behind in the light with a song wearing boots or a belt and a gun drinking wine when it's time when the long week is done but she works when she works in the laundry in jail she works when she works consider the queen she sleeps when she sleeps with the king in the kingdom She sleeps when she sleeps with the wall, with whatever it is who happens to call, with me and with you, to survive you make do, you explore more and more. So she sleeps when she sleeps, a really deep sleep.
Consider the queen, a full black glorious, a purple rose aroused by the tiger breathing beside her, a shell with the moaning of ages inside her, a hungry one feeding the folk what they need. Consider the queen. Black man, let that white girl go.
She know what you oughta know by now. Mama, mama, mama, mama, family face, face of the family alive. Mama, mammy, mama, woman, sister, baby, love. The house on fire, poison waters, earthquake in the air, a nightmare. Turn, turn, turn around the national gross product growing really gross.
Turn, turn, turn the pestilence away, the miserable killers in Canarsie, Alabama, people begging to be people, warfare on the welfare of the folk. Hey, turn, turn away the trick bag university, the trick bag propaganda, trick bag tricklings of prosperity, of pseudo status, lynch tree necklace on the song round neck of you, my mama, mama, mama. Turn away the FBI, the state police, the cops.
the every one of the incestuous investigators into you and daddy into us hey turn my mother turn the face of history to your own and please be smiling if you can be smiling at the family mama mama let the funky forecast be the last one we will ever want to listen to and daddy see the stars fall down and burn a light into the singing darkness of your eyes my daddy my black man You take my body in your arms. You use the oil of coconuts, of trees and flowers, fish and new fruits from the new world to inflame me in this otherwise cold place, please. Meanwhile, Mama, Mama, Mama, teach me how to... Kiss the king within the kingdom. Teach me how to TCB to make do and be like you.
Teach me to survive my mama. Teach me how to hold a new life mama. Help me turn the face of history to your face.
Ah mama, did the house ever know the nighttime of your spirit? The flash and flame of you who once... Well, we crouched in what you called the little room, where your dresses hung in their palette colorings, an uninteresting row of uniforms, and where there were dusty, sweet-smelling boxes of costume jewelry that, nevertheless, shone like rubies, gold, and diamonds once. In that place, where the second-hand mirror blurred the person dull, that place without windows, with doors instead of walls, so that your small space most resembled a large and rather hazardous closet once.
In there you told me, whispering that once you had wanted to be an artist, someone, you explained, who could just boldly go and sit near the top of a hill and watch the setting of the sun. Oh, Mama, you said this had been your wish when you were quite as young as I was then, a 12-or 13-year-old girl. who heard your confidence with almost terrified amazement. What had happened to you and your wish? Would it happen to me too?
Ah, Mama, the little room of your secrets, your costumery, perfumes, and photographs of an old boyfriend you did not marry for reasons not truly clear to me as I saw you make sure time after time that his pictures were being kept as clean and as safely as possible. The little room adjoined the kitchen, the kitchen where no mystery survived except for the mystery of you. Woman who covered her thick and long black hair with a starched white nurse's cap when she went on duty away from our home. Into the hospital I came to hate jealously.
Woman who rolled up her wild and heavy beautiful hair before she went to bed. Woman who tied a head rag around the waving kinky well-washed braids. or lengthy fat curls of her hair while she moved without particular grace or light between the table and the stove between the sink and the table around and around and around in the spacious ugly kitchen where she where you never dreamed about what you were doing or what you might do instead and where you taught me to set down plates and silverware and even fresh cut flowers from the garden without appetite, without excitement, without expectation. It was not there, in that obvious, open, square cookery where you spent most of the hours of the days.
It was not there, in the kitchen, where nothing ever tasted sweet or sharp enough to sate the yearnings I began to suspect inside your eyes, and also inside the eyes of my father. It was not there that I began to hunger for the sun as my own legitimate preoccupation. It was not there in the kitchen that I began really to love you.
Ah, Mama, it was where I found you, hidden away in your little room, where your life and the power, the rhythms of your sacrifice, the ritual of your bowed head and your laughter, always partly concealed. Where all of you womanly reverberated big as the whole house, it was there that I came humbly into an angry and absolute determination that I would one day prove myself to be, in fact, your daughter. Ah, Mama, I am still trying.