Then, when she came to visit me, her hair would
be slightly out of character, having just climbed
all the precinct stairs. I’d tell them inside:
“it’s flour.” By that point, she wouldn’t ask me
or have a dollar. She’d be stumbling through
legal fees and all life else—residuals of my bastard presence.
Animal Phat Farm
... the quarreling and biting and jealousy which had been normal
features of life … had almost disappeared.
—George Orwell, Animal Farm
Almost
all niggas are fly, but some niggas are flyer than others.
This is law like how all squares are rectangles but not
all rectangles are squares. Collapse that: some niggas are
squares. Some need the threads to carry the conversation,
the freshest cuts of fabric currying favor for their flavor,
and that’s the bare minimum to establish blackness as
his mind’s orientation. Regarding crack sales, B.I.G.
left behind ten commandments but the boys went and
settled on a cool seven to truly see if skin is kin, two
being the designer wear and flyness-inequality edicts
already stressed. The rest: whatever approaches with
two raised fists is a hater that must be dealt with swiftly;
whatever goes up on four legs, or has wings, gets chopped
up and fried for dinner in the grease trap; no nigga shall
put sleep or studying above the pursuit of sex; no nigga
shall refuse to sip the reddest Kool-Aid; no real one shall
be killed on the court, or on the field, or on the joysticks
on multiplayer mode, or in any situation where somebody
can corroborate his apparent inadequacy, strip him down
to the most supreme stereotype and then deny, deny, deny.ss
Etymology of Gangsta
And here the original one saying hello to my little friend is
my own hand, oh so carefully cradling my equipment like
an athletic cup though likewise being a boast toward the boy
in the mirror that is black but ain’t buck, his jaw literally
glass and needing to be freed of nerve, made to feel nada.
It takes hard practice to accept the grammar of the G’s body
language as second nature, to represent physically how the slick
replacement of the –er sound with an –uh sound simultaneously
implies more effortless and more ruthless. Eric “Eazy-E” Wright
of all people once lunched in George H. W. Bush’s White House,
so don’t tell me about dead ends; don’t tell me about the dead
since I’m clearly one of the realest alive.
All my life church ladies have said glorify, glorify, glorify and
that was game if I ever heard it: as I see it, in a bigoted society,
I’ve either got the respect that the homies give me or I’ve got
no respect at all, plus God forgives anyway and Jesus was black
like dude that played Nino Brown. Name a better way to make
through the cold, cruel world than this; we didn’t write the rules
governing our lives, so we have to break them all on principle.
It’s been said sweet-singing Frank Sinatra ran with the Mafia;
Al Capone’s picture hangs on the wall at Portillo’s and you
want to tell me the country has beef with crime when it really
only has beef with me and mines.
What didn’t click with Ice Cube ’n nem in y’all’s heads is exactly
what did in ours. Since you gave us hate when we wanted justice
something had to come of it: remember energy is neither created
nor destroyed, fool. So what if I’m a ruffian who would only wear
a suit to my own funeral? Go on, throw that salt somewhere else.
I’m your gross, domestic product, America. A lie you sold yourself.
Only my mama can judge me, and you wouldn’t believe what I’m
buying her as soon as I get on:
paradise, paradise, paradise—
a big-ass crib, a white maid.
Still Life with Crooked Painting and Bullet Holes in Grayscale
I re-route Wi-Fi signals with hair
curled like copper wire. I talented
tenth, top one percent of my high
school class. I type of teacher’s pet,
some special black mascot running
laps on a spinning wheel. I tongue
English with a train track switch,
proper syntax and sin against it
separately with kin-skin. I shoot
the basketball as well as white
boys do. I jump when I feel like it.
I politically correct fools without
pity, left-hand strong-arm the whole
debate. I Palestinian sympathize.
I stan for equality of marriage and
pay in opposite of Slim Shady. I
grassy knoll know-it-all, act a bold
question of trifling men. I prorate
COINTELPRO coin for our big
payback. I conspiracy of dead slaves
given bones to fall back on. I flag
America like football referees for
penalties recorded in blood. I try to
tackle black girls with my chapped
lips and miss them all. I gospel rock
and two-step. I thuggish-ruggish
on some ham bones. I put a suit on
and shake their hands, thank you
sir and ma’am. I pull my pants up
high and then I let them sag.
(Sub)Urban Dictionary
I think there’s a little white man inside all of us.
Though my look precedes me, in this case,
I’m not talking about the shack-creeping slave master
but the crown-funded discoverer of pre-existing things,
the explorer of the exotic via means aquatic or terrestrial.
Oh lookie here, another settlement by a river—between two rivers,
in fact. Fresh off the boat of the skies, I walk among the savage
appetites tearing into thin steak strips and Cheez Whiz with
pointed teeth. How they strut, I study. The men dress their faces
in bales of black hair from cheek to cheek; the women braid
or lock or unlock or under-tuck theirs beneath the most humble and
homely cloths. My ears snag on the rusty dialect like fabric; my eyes
widen when I recognize the continent staring me back in the ego,
a vowel and three consonants exact:
J-A-W-N. Entry, dated 2003: a person, place, or thing.
Oh lookie here: I’ve been
a person, a place,
a thing.
It used to be they would put every rap record in my mouth
and press play. It used to be my body was Africa herself,
something with boundaries they didn’t understand. It used to be
“Charleston Chew” or “C-Murder” they’d call me in place of
my mother’s wishes. See murder:
first entry, the killing of another human being under conditions
specifically covered in law, I explain; second entry, slang, something
extremely difficult or perilous, I explain; third entry, a group
or flock of crows, I explain; I explain, explain, explain the world
while they circle ominously, in omen, oh man, I really want them
to just go away, or that I fade away, or they catch the fade from me,
or hair clippers give me a fade and they can’t recognize me anymore,
except for the savagery, of course—measured in melanin and
my talent for tearing through the meat of grammar with my teeth:
fools got me tweakin’ off this ghetto glossary gimmick fo’ real. 23
Them, always taking my word to take my word: jockin’, jackin’—
whatever. Just let me live where I live is what I say, or be trying to.
Dissplacement
Come. Come dear
stranger. Look into my life and witness what has become a kind
of motif for my particular existence. What started in childhood
has carried through to college like the habit of studying; as I did
back then, I mull the young men and women around me through
two corrective lenses. On quiet nights I visit their various rooms,
press my sorry face through TV screens stuck on static in attempts
to introduce myself: get scrambled into a mix of black and white
pixels, my melanin utterly unreliable in helping place me into a
“fux with” or “don’t fux with” box on the fly. Where I’m from
has always been the harder question for me to answer than why
I’m from there: the aspirational cultural cliché of better schools,
less crime, less violence, less us but only because they would
never allow any more, which is an incomplete truth that we use
to convince ourselves we haven’t left our own behind, including
ourselves in a metaphysical sense. Every place I’ve ever been
I’ve touched like a friendly ghost, and not that of a boy who bit
the bullet with his chest but one who died of natural causes and
got lost on the way to heaven for not having his smartphone to
look up a map or a city grid to deduce the direction. Try dialing
me sometime, actually. My area code falls outside the boundaries
of the place I most cherish but can’t claim more than a fraction
of my impeccable rearing, and wouldn’t anyway; yet that exact
same phone number doesn’t lead me anywhere I feel safe being
anything less than exceptional, which is certainly not a home or
hospice one visits to find peace, and that’s before I consider what
the house has become in my absence. And all of this is to say that
I don’t know what to say anymore or never did. I don’t know what
I did to deserve being looked through as though my organs aren’t
here to hide my naked blood. That’s how it feels, truly, so believe
me when I tell you this: there really is no hell on Earth quite like
standing right in front of you.
Elegy for a False Sense of Security
Tell me how you entered this poem, how you even got in
here. Where my parentals come from is where I’m coming from
and where where I’m coming from is from we lock the front door
and the back and the side and can’t spare a single extra key. Where
where I’m coming from is from we shut all the windows tight like
our eyes to an ugly view: a jail if I ever saw one, and maybe I did,
and maybe that was enough for me. Maybe you made the mistake,
by coming here. Unannounced. Uninvited. It takes a lot of talent
to step in someone’s crib and be welcomed without any alarms
going off, so shake your ass something dangerous if you can,
sing me a song real sexy-like or be suck out of luck if I feel
like shooting strangers today. If home is where the heart is
then four red bullet wounds across the chest of the city’s flag
say everything there is about my feelings toward you and
the whole damn world right now. Because it was my own
blood this time and yet I’m still here, and the funny thing
about that town and this one is that they both burned down
once. And down the hall they’re burning bud and I want some
kinda sorta but without the friends. Which makes you foe,
I suppose, as if you are the presence of all colors and I am
the absence of said colors. But maybe I got it backwards,
twisted it all up. It just hurts to have my hair pulled even if
it’s by my own hand. My mind is spinning blanks inside every
chamber; everywhere I turn on the TV they’re shooting boys
like what I used to be before I wasn’t anymore and when did that
happen? And what am I now? Are you the phantom or me, me
or none of the above? The last shadow I cast on a sunny Sunday
stole my wallet and bought this gun and all the rounds and all
the rounds at the bar, too. Where I’m coming from, when in love:
squeeze. When lonely, loan yourself some time and don’t pay it
back. Beware, because I’m both lonely and in love like the living
embodiment of the code switch. I’m polluted air and poisoned water
and whatever else they say except when I say I’m not and I’m not
one to play for a fool for the record. Fear me. I’m godly and I’m just
and just get the hell out demon and do come again. Come again:
it’s my igneous ire toward you that keeps me a live wire, and alive.
Newton’s Third Law / Negritude’s First Law
To at least one force I’m equal
in magnitude and opposite in direction,
a law of motion enveloped in a man.
Swagger, sway—whatever you want to call it,
it’s scientific. Measurable, if not quantifiable. Fixed,
I praise and cuss by parting the same lips
and there’s not one thing you can say to
persuade me that God doesn’t like gangsters
or appreciate their habitual leans.
It’s not stated explicitly in Genesis, but
He had to come from nothing, too. He gets it,
as does His son who ran the streets with whores,
who were just women until men pulled wordswords
out of their itchy throats.
I know these types, speaking as if to scratch,
always so willing to dress you down to
your holey drawers and socks, getting lost
in some idea of respect, getting off on power
like a light switch standing erect.
Merely by breathing I disavow and distance them.
I danger up a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
I dance around their burning straw man
pedaling backwards on the balls of my feet.
I ball by any means necessary; they banish
me to be in absentia until I make bail. But
no boo hoo here; I won’t cry over spilled
blood anymore. I steady my base, build
momentum at the hips, and swing through
the me behind the me you see to get to you.
II.
Genesis 10:11
for C. Janise
An awkward time in life is learning what a boy’s boy-parts can do
just as a new baby enters the house to everyone’s surprise. This
symmetry in sequencing is not to say anything of preteen pregnancy—
God forbid—though it’s true the human body speaks in blood and
bone density what language tries to catch up to with labels: attributions,
implications of ownership or responsibility. The textbook says there’s
a difference between a father and a brother, biologically speaking, but
know this: parenting is an unlicensed practice, which is precisely why
any fool like me can do it, and she was unsolicited my parents tell me
but never knew of my bedside prayer that night of the full-bellied moon
that she would come make o
ur tribe more evenly divisible; thus three kids
became four, two boys and two girls to file as love dependents, and since
I asked for this when I could’ve asked for a growth spurt or my first kiss,
I feel I bear a certain weight for her, partly due to her growing each and
every day, becoming heavier to hold with my hands, in my arms, even
in the name I was given a chance to pick for her and did from the front of
the Bible. But still, I know most of the holding is in the upward direction
and height of my hopes for her, in the eleven earthly years between us
that are tanks of experience, of wisdom she can draw out like oxygen, air.
It’s sort of weird and maybe unfair to say, but with some of my own ways,
she could become an heir—to the unrepentant love of video games and
Japanese animation, the dismissal of juvenile company—though those
only reading complexion will claim she takes after her real daddy, and
mine, missing her look up to me. I, however, can’t afford to do the same.
Apologia with a Pregnancy Test and Weeping Jesus
It happens with a splash of urine, and then a condemnation:
a tiny red cross that means with child. Prior that, it’s two
bodies—church girl, boy that won’t pull his pants up—rubbing
tectonically in dark rooms, on the backseat of a Buick, making
barnyard noises: I know that. And this is, what, the second or
third baby? And I’ve never seen him, or them, come through
these sanctuary doors on their knees, bowing their heads,
begging for mercy squeezed from vined fruit, not one time.
Every strong black woman, every preacher I know has told me
this is how our men destroy, and I don’t want to be the kind of
Negro that does the easy thing: trifling. My voice, though not
ripened, shows resolve, unnerves the young woman’s mother
when I, the golden boy, ask about marriage and why it hasn’t
happened yet. That I don’t grasp, or couldn’t grasp back then.
What I did: Mary was a pregnant teen, but also a virgin. Jesus