he said there’s nothing about us
a psalm
without us, dissolution as in:
stagnation, intransigence in black
life, pure force undiluted by
reparation, an unfamilial beauty
indebted to pale reflections whose
possibility for neutral remains
undiagnosed: it’s too easy to say
white is neutral, splintered i:
dentities and emergent modes re:
defining oppression as a poetry
prompt, free use and always fair
trade, leaves only the purposeful
discontents disconnected. blackness
not neutral, the shape of the back of
my head is not neutral, the ways mother
names each of her grandparents in the blur:
red quadrants where my hair grows against
its best interests are not neutral, questioning
when I should apply what product, that part
behind your cowlicks, isn’t that funny, I don’t
see a lot of regular people with hair like that an:
other forms of mimicry: can a caricature resist
the smooth charcoal scratches darkening our own
outlines [prerecorded bodies poorly painted by ex:
pensive pencils rosying cheeks of toy soldiers] mimicry
are prerecorded bodies, [mimicry]
are masks, [mimicry] are pressed onto
postcards and offered free for museum
opening weekends, [mimicry] are now available
for purchase, [mimicry] are silhouettes of enslaved
bodies with intimate trans-Atlantic travel plans and
[mimicry] dreams of the rising white pillar of Washington’s
monument you can’t help but see when leaving the gift
shop where you’re told all proceeds contribute to curating
the archives, [mimicry] are assumptions my body will be
curated, mocking blank blue screens after presentation
endings, read close enough every white text about black
text feels guilty for the open ocean, the water’s only blue
in recreation, the earliest paintings, how poorly they capture
live bodies projected onto prerecorded bodies in the complex:
ions of masks I wear: what does my body feel when it touches
skin: outrageously magical things happen when you play around
without the semblance of a symbol
lesser homilies
discourse! the provenance of whiteness deserves more
working through, demands reprocessing language
past thought into instinct into the common idea:
logical heritages of man into every good philosopher
must once contend with kant into the theological
roots of hermeneutics demand we recall the sacred
responsibility unto King Kunta with a Black Jesus
hanging in his hut, framed with switches grand:
mother found behind the great house into the Other
should be capitalized, every retelling of Icarus
performed as an homage to our ancestors
drowning, unable to afford a plane ticket.
Icarus need not be a cautionary tale; learning
to read demands we draw very close to its
light, eyes and skin acclimate to abduction, all
our gods’ children can have wings, in youth’s
speculative poetics, line breaks don’t fall into the sea.
In the hands of a black poet, what becomes of the oldest myths?
Can they stack or pool or bend, are they passed between bodies, slip
through fingers, soothe in slippage, break into creases, accelerate into
opacity, divination, the inevitable of warping what’s left in common:
we are stoic, not silenced; we are laying lucidity
to rest; we are buying stock in the intractable Other.
the bad man’s prophet ≡ the world’s gone to hell
vulnerability to the unsanctioned premature
death is a birthright speculative and soluble
manifest as double sided reprinted slave
holds, our bodies always been match sticks.
we were printed in the same weight and shade
as the half-height walls and the rounded hull
smooth and human meant for a return voyage
we weren’t offered our own reproductions were
not built for. enough of us drown becoming a pronoun.
