A Can of Murray’s Pomade, 1990–Present
Like any strong trait of mine,
it belonged to him first.
A single orange can sitting in the top drawer
under the bathroom sink (on his side),
next to a set of Andis trimmers because
we cannot use razors like they can, he later said.
Every week, as I dressed to impress
the lipstick of church matriarchs onto my cheek,
he would take grease to palm, rub it well
into my scalp like a moral. A good man.
Brushing my hair with a stern brush.
Necessarily coarse for the course,
of course.
I came back for a short time,
post-graduation. Little brother wearing
shirts with no collars, she said.
I found the can in “his” bathroom,
the couple on its emblem more
packaged than I ever recalled.
After scanning the house,
it seemed the other artifacts
had been excavated completely.
Boxed and moved. Trashed.
But the can came with me when
I left: a shadow created by a son.
I even use it on occasion:
can still feel those hands molding,
trying to make something
handsome out of me.
Still Life with Woman and Balloons in Noir
I remember we crucified a song that night:
nailed it to the wall, let it bleed,
we sinful rolling stones.
It was dark—like the back of a mouth
is dark—except for the moon,
a vibration of ambiance
we inhaled, pushed out
through verbs of muscle.
My name sat on your tongue in peril.
It couldn’t hold on, eventually
fell where nobody could see it.
I remember your arms separating
from your shoulders,
your legs losing touch
with the ground; you
became a happy phantom
the alchemy of passion made
using nothing but
the vapor of a leaf
laughing inside a flame.
I had to tie you around my pointer finger—
keep you from floating off,
drifting homeless in the space
between dying stars
like just another fantasy.
The blood helped hold you down, too,
I guess: why you
always seem to like the artists
I put you onto, play
their songs to death; I tease you,
sometimes
into fever pitch, and
until the lights come on,
we don’t have to be alone
with what we’ve done.
Gangsters, Disciples
for R. Dotse
Beloved, you take me there: hold me down,
cuff me if I like it—the bad boy’s punishment
or the black’s. Your daddy is white, but what
does that suggest for the roses at my funeral
or yours? What shade of grief would they be?
in our patterns and pains. While you lay there
bleeding, I hold your hand and pour out a little
Lillet for you. Half of the time you hate me
enough to lay hands on me; we come to blows
because it feels good and let live. Bless those
broken homes that rubber-banded us together,
baptized us in dust and danger never knowing
when to pull out of a dicey situation. And so
I wipe the blade clean after it’s made ribbons
of the flesh; you remain ready to take that heat
for me, handle product. We both have records
we’re running from like errant needles. I know
we’re on probation: it may come down to you
or me and a real gangster must choose themself.
Still Life with the Color Orange
Whoever you are. Wherever you are…. I’m starting to think we’re a
lot alike. Human beings spinning on blackness. All wanting to be seen,
touched, heard, paid attention to.
—Frank Ocean, from his open letter
A distant friend has just come out of the closet, announced that he is
in a blissful relationship with another man. I like his Facebook status,
type a brief note of congratulations, then exhale, deliberately—push
love into the atmosphere. I sit on the thought for a while, on love.
I have just moved to Atlanta to take a job, my very first full-time,
my college degrees freshly minted, a handsome sum of money all in
my name promised every two weeks until the day it isn’t. Nothing
is a certainty at this point: their marriage is over, a cold thing,
and we may never find our merry ways back to one another in
the ways we were before, all under the roof of one name; each
of us young ones, us four—two boys, two girls—will grow up
until the day we don’t anymore, doing so in different places,
the metaphysics of orbiting thoughts dictating our spaces and
times intersect with the frequency our prayers are answered.
My girlfriend will be living with her mother in a distant city
until the day she isn’t, or I’m not, or we stop loving each other
or love each other enough to let go—if it all comes down to us
not coming together. I have a brand new car that I rather like,
so smooth a ride that I can feel every bump in the road. That
brings me comfort, knowing the tires won’t let go of the asphalt
without a fight—some friction is healthy in any relationship.
I have started fires for warmth and tried to keep them burning;
I don’t light trees, but I try to laugh as if I did, through the spells
of doubt and loneliness punctuated by flights at $300 a pop at
minimum, and I notice the sun does shine as bright and hot here
as the rumors said it would, hangs on a bit longer than it did in
Philly even though the time is synonymous between here and
there. That’s my favorite moment to be on the highway. As I drive,
the sun visor offers me little sanctuary, but the whole sky is in blush
and the roads are wide and wind as if they are unsure themselves
of which ways to go, and that comforts me, too. I use the stereo
while driving, singing with the music in a citrus-timbre, thinking so
far ahead everything l see is in grayscale: I’m trying to follow the
directions to get there. Make only the right turns. Make only right.
Grand Street
Picture me: northbound, driving through a blizzard like
a moment of sobriety breaking through a cocaine high,
tuning out the sirens from an accident site off in the ether,
trying not to imagine my black ass getting pulled over.
Honestly, this should’ve been a futile exercise but somehow
I made it alive: bags full of clothes in the trunk, cardboard
boxes on the back and front passenger seats, me—nearly
ready to pass out from one day’s drive stretched over into
the next like just another state line crossed by paying a toll.
What should have been a thirteen-hour trip, give or take,
became nineteen hours plus, which gave me extra time to think,
and time to think is something I’ve always taken without
guilt. And because I did again, I know this isn’t a mistake—
to move in together
, to move up and move on from whatever
life I might’ve had in fair Georgia, pretending blindness to
the psychological dimension of physical distance, how
even emotions atrophy from lack of consistent exercise.
It’s important for a man to be touched sometimes, outside
the allure of imminent sex but inside the confines of a general
concern for another human being and how well or not their
being goes. I gained weight down South, so that spills my
secret should someone know to listen to the tuning of a heart
and how, as if cracking a safe. And how does she know this?
Where do women learn such resourceful behaviors? Lord
have mercy. After an odyssey, I might’ve finally made it
home, made home of a person and not a hollow like men do
by habit who’ve survived culture wars but not themselves. Yet.
The Love Song of Percy Sledgehammer
When a man loves a woman, can’t keep his mind on nothing but
some money: now ain’t that some shit, boo? That, or a brother might
be thinking my baby got ass for years but knows by soul all that ass
ain’t free, and yet it can’t be bought or owned either, not by no boy-
person. Plus the way they say our love is set up looks like a setup to
me, a jig, just another means to justify falling short of full protection
under the law when it all falls down on the back of my neck like a boot
made of jurisprudence and then you’re forced to cry over me—a fool
who wasn’t about anything half the time, wasn’t half as smart as he
believed he was most days. Ah, to be broke and broken and black,
to be male and machete and marriage material in your eyes despite
my jagged edges, all these angles I learned specifically so nobody
could touch me and not bleed. Don’t mind that I’m a bit dull, dopey,
the antithesis of a dope dealer: am I still not potentially dangerous
behind closed doors on account of what’s in my pants and what’s in
yours? Is the tenor of my voice not that of a man who knows how to
make folks feel things with their whole bodies, even bad things? I try
to be better than that, to do better, because even if I don’t know right
exactly I do know what’s not right or not really even close, do you get
what I’m getting at, my love? I’m saying that I don’t especially believe
in their silly definition of respectable, but I do believe in respect as if
Aretha Franklin was my mama and schooled me so. I’m saying that
I don’t wonder why they call you bitch because I was in the room with
them before I came to yours needing to detox. I’m saying that I think
I love you right but can never be certain being what I am. These hands
have only ever segued into sledgehammers and you know I possess
the voice of a steel-driving man; like a mockingbird, I inflect the pain
so pretty and perfect: the makings of a smash hit are in me at all times.
Jesus Piece
Jacob the Jeweler, tell me, what faith can I afford and is this it?
Hamitic features set in diamonds are out of stock everywhere.
Object permanence ain’t forever for me and mines unless a play
on words; bodies like this get repossessed all the time, objects,
even now. In this day and age. At my age, or more years, or less,
it’s seemingly no large matter at all. But let me be practical for
just a moment: I could put a ring on it for a price of less than
half of this gaudy Hebrew head, a big rock, and that’s a beautiful
thought to mind. I’d like to think I’m a respectable young man.
I even have a dental plan, a 401(k) in case I grow old and gray
someday. Surely marriage would prove me a creature of love
and not of hereditarily bad habits, right? I’ve got no real vices
beyond going behind the curtains of voting booths, but I realize
I can only fake belief in men for so long—in mankind’s kindness,
I should say. That’s why I’m so tempted here—this old idea of
God being with me wherever I go, like look, my messiah is made
entirely of ice. You know, for all the swelling. For all the blood
and the anger at the blood spilled that wasn’t scripted by scripture.
This could signal to people that God’s got me on the other side;
they wouldn’t believe one nice thing a black woman said about me.
A Character Solemnly Torn
I never wanted to be another masculine combustion,
some bastard contraption with a short fuse strung down
his throat and a stick of dynamite in his Hanes briefs,
because such a being would be entirely too sexy a kill
in my estimation, the mark another man’s name will
be built off of in certain circles, and I want all blood
to become imaginary after obsessing over blood for
a lifetime already far too real. And besides, I’m not
the most handsome man by any means. I don’t have
such a symmetrical face as to make a good mural
in a gentrifying neighborhood or be airbrushed on
a white T-shirt with a wish for peaceful rest when
it’s the world that should stop with the bullshit. Guns
don’t kill people, and yet; people kill people, and yet
I can’t always blame them, even being harmed by
their hands. I can’t sleep and still I have a dream that,
one day, my four little children, my three, my two,
my last remaining baby will be there to lower me into
the mouth of the earth like a bar of soap so her mother
needn’t do it alone, though I nearly pushed them both
to madness as I myself was pushed at the speed of centrist
complacency. I feel I haven’t said anything about being
black yet and also that I’ve somehow said it all by now.
Hakuna matata to that, I guess. The past firmly behind me,
I drop my ass into soft leather and spill myself to the psych
expert like a glass of water, he asking me if I’m half empty
or half full and how long I’ve been feeling like I’m being
seen through by everyone with a thumb on my dollar. And
this is all a ruse, of course, as the other he is another me,
a projection against my ample forehead from the back of
the theater. Best believe that if my life was a movie I was
talking the whole way through it, trying to make the room
feel less bare, make the film seem more breathtaking for
being shot completely in the moonlight; I would’ve cut it
at the scene where she first took my breath away and then
there would be no sequel to be panned. And I’d do it all
just to hear the one of me say: that there’s a classic, man.
III.
Self-Portrait as a Shadow
for V. Lamar
Word is I wasn’t born so much as skimmed off another living thing
by a source of light. Let’s just say that you are light-skinned and
the back of my mom’s hand is a color best worn around the eyes
after a knuckle’s kiss, though this fact itself is not here to imply
I was born of an act of violence, but, rather, that I was born into
violence as a cultural practice and product. And I enter post-crack,
post-Reagan, when the big city newspapers sell themselves with
headlines about shadow-on-shadow crime like light doesn’t factor
into the equation by definition, like light doesn’t have a gaze upon
the world called the day. Fact of the matter is—
sad as the matter is,
I can only see myself in relation to it, to the light; I can only move in
reaction to movement, my ankles shackled to dogma that dogs me and us
out from the moment of first appearance. In my case, that’s June 1990.
Summer. Maternity ward full of shadows and from then on I can only
measure love by the number of nightmares I have in a shortened span
of space and simultaneity. They all always say I look like my daddy,
which is to frame me a shadow in a related sense, which is to say your
presence gives my own life definition, which is what they like to say
on TV whenever some kid like me is extinguished too soon. Under the
lights, I make due with all of this being watched and watched over and
I make questions of it, too. And I ask. And you answer: not always well,
often incompletely but completely honest at the same time, and that is
how the concept of faith clicks for me, how I learn to perturb politics
and push myself into conversations like the connotation of a word or
phrase, which, too, is a form of shadow, thus a part of me, who upon
a lot of light shines that I take advantage of, take care that whenever
they flick the switch to turn them on—themselves, on—that they’ll
be sure to see me trailing tightly behind, keeping them on their toes
like they’ve kept me on mine, like you always told me they would.
Hip-Hop Introspective
Got to give us what we want
Gotta give us what we need
Our freedom of speech is freedom of death
We got to fight the powers that be
—Chuck D. (Public Enemy), “Fight the Power”
Summer is the fever of a year and it refuses to break,
beats itself over my skull as I sleep, stripped down
to my Power Rangers briefs, the shoddy window above
my head hanging open in relief: the mouth of a panting house.
I toss, I turn like a vinyl of blood in the sheets,
body playing music through all my pores,
the booming system at my circulatory center
in duress, escalating its cadence rapidly.