Poetry Short and Suite

Homeboy offers The Homegirl a coat by the Anarchist Bus Smash, 19th and Pacific, December 2019

In the re-baring metaphor, in the rebroken window.
The brickbat and the drum are indistinguishable.
Mask men pantomime into fabrics of darkness
to people with scars waiting for work.
The sunshine warriors rainbows sign
is this stop that leaves people drenched on the block.

The wind at hill bottom is an Old Testament hawk.
Arbitrary patterns in the front and back end
bite folks, then move to the south.
Broke glass cover offers them pickings
in the jagged stage of anarchy unspoke
and guards/protections performatively broken.

And limbo becomes the terrain of the theoretical.
Old Testament wrath becomes outsourced in a picnic
with swords and guns in father’s closets
with sticks the manchild’s preface to the long knife
with the only thing wounded the bus line.

Summer generals raze game battlefields
then leave bloodless as pieces reflect them
the cycle of reenactments upon past reenactments
the folly of Fauxes and Panthers.
Sharp edges and sides are endless repackages
with prices Venmos won’t cover.
Let me cover you sis, when our storm is too long
Let me cover you when the revolution is over.

***

Elders Form An Old Country Circle At The School Bus Stop

The wild elders soul clap and hoof.
Circles form in hambones and kicked gravel.
Old men in tandem remix ring shouts
As peach branches, on their left hips,
turn to pistols.
Work too hard to be this free.
Don’t bring Ruckus. Don’t ring Ruckus.
Circle shell tambourine call stops to the Carolinas.
Double time echoes Red Dusts and The Delta.
Buckets and blocks from Georgia woods
pound the pavement two-three-two.
The old men dance to get babies home
refiguring the ground of their journey.
We’ll bring your babies from your sea.
Don’t bring Ruckus. Don’t bring Ruckus.
Hambones rise from Sea Islands to Sea Islands.
They affix patterns moving and still.
Stomps from old clays’s hock bandana’s red artifices
as they circle dilapidated trap mills
and evening bus stops.
Bones reverberate from hip claps to pieces
as hoods scatter from the circle.
The old men form around the young students
the caravan block moving circle.
Come along, come along school children
come along when the sun is shining bright.
Come along, come home to live, my children
there will be no Ruckus tonight.

***

Uncle Moe and Grandaddy’s Aesthetics Of Bird House Making At Wapapto.

Take the table to the cabin
the cabin of the park.
Take the tools and the bag
as your uncle touches the water
his hand print mimeographs to god

Take his fingers as they contract
through remembrances of chains
as he grits through floors and memory
as planks form then reform
to replicas of shelters
branches remade to the blocks’ hiding places
take your uncle to touch them.

Take food to each made,
to each migration.
to the fuel of the turn back,
that reverse exodus in ice
that inverse getting up morning
that validates the now if not the memory
that touches, in sithed and jagged grans
the thing that keeps flies in their travel
the creations and the food
to keep you and the birds moving
Toward a second promised lands
Take hope in sweat. Take hope in food
Take hope in their promised land.


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