“What Can Brown Do For
You?”
I don’t want to give this Kenny G. clown
The pleasure or privilege
Of letting him think he’s pried the knife
Into the wound and twisted
making the life that injustice couldn’t kill
Writhe with deeper (exasperating) agony
(while language says “lighten up”)
the glories of deep gossip
the art of the tweet
the ways ideas circulate on instagram
what you can say on a facewall post
buzzing with electrons of urgency
may make one turn to poetry
as if you can organize it in poetry
like a truce between Bloods & Crips:
“Give Us The Hammer And Nails
And We’ll Rebuild This City.”
(now that’s a
found text:
But to even out the field
and bring the conceptual mind SO HIGH
(as high as the sons of gold handlers and smiths)
to the “ungrammatical profundity”
of a showered, sweating, living, even laughing
mother like Yuvette Henderson
not enough of a thing for the idea—
The noble art of still lives
Alchemy algorithms
That fit in perfectly with the instagram agenda—
Transparent
Your ass
“to make nothing happen
on the condition nothing makes something happen”
an odorific octagon (of oppression)
the voice that loves to pronounce dead
(no ideas but in thing thugs)
but you’re even worse at freestylin’ than me
Maybe she can teach you the higher beauty
And ethics of the battle-rap you call bullying
The kids playing around making fun of a cop
On the one night they let the subway stay open past
midnight—
To die for a smidgeon of the freedom and safety
You take for granted, but don’t even test
While priding yourself on an envelope push beyond “clowning”
(of course, “I’m just judging me, projecting on you”)
Your standards dance in my consciousness
Like steel scaffoldings in a Politburo’s deep freeze
(zero? Below zero?) so cold it burns the skin off
like nails in coffins of propriety
(perhaps a tender offstage aside
in your allegedly powerful coroner vox)
and even granting those stress-inducing standards,
leaning on their “transparent” scaffolding anchor
to gaze at the broad chokehold
of the ground zero sky, WTC towers going down
from the bloody eye of the concept
while the spirit that enlivened them
goes underground, diffused
like an oil spill with dispersants
realizing it doesn’t need a building
to be impersonal anymore and take the “I” out of tirade
as you mimic the “frictionless flow” of capital
(as satisfying as fruitcake, or fracking…
like a bikini bottom that matches the burqa
or backward baseball cap of geo weather engineering)
Yes, even by the standards you stress,
Within your time-tested terms,
of “found texts” and “uncreative writing,”
I wonder
why you couldn’t have chosen, say,
a highschool student paper
or perhaps the application form
that so charmed the college admission board
into accepting Michael Brown--
as a fascinating specimen for your schtick?
Maybe such texts would be too hard to find….
Would require some digging….
Befriending his parents, who don’t hate all whites,
Or even talking to the kid on the sidewalk
You apparently have to walk sometimes
Who might remind you of him…
I bet you’d still find a way to make this gesture
Strike oil, steal gold or otherwise offend
But at least you could counter
The stereotype of the voiceless black beast
Or even celebrate the beauty in the beat
Jordan Davis got murdered for….
April 2015 (Poetry Month)
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