"A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will.
Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.
We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.
We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new
Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy,and create. What will be
the sacred word?
- Imamu Amiri Baraka
He had got, finally,
to the forest
of motives. There were no
owls, or hunters. No Connie Chatterleys
resting beautifully
on their backs, having casually
brought socialism
to England.
Only ideas,
and their opposites
Like,
he was really
nowhere.
The gaunt thing
with no organs
creeps along the streets
of Europe, she will
commute, in her feathered bat stomach-gown
with no organs
with sores on her insides
even her head
a vast puschamber
of pus(sy) memories
with no organs
nothing to make babies
she will be the great witch of euro-american legend
who sucked the life
from some unknown nigger
whose name will be known
but whose substance will not ever
not even by him
who is dead in a pile of dopeskin
This bitch killed a friend of mine named Bob Thompson
a black painter, a giant, once, she reduced
to a pitiful imitation faggot
full of American holes and a monkey on his back
slapped airplanes
from the empire state building
May this bitch and her sisters, all of them,
receive my words
in all their orifices like lye mixed
cocola and alaga syrup
feel this shit, bitches, feel it, now laugh your
hysterectic laughs
while your flesh burns
and your eyes peel to red mud
It cannot come
except you make it
from materials
it is not
caught from. (The philosophers
of need, of which
I am lately
one,
will tell you. ôThe People,?
(and not think themselves
liable
to the same
trembling flesh). I say now, ôThe People,
as some lesson repeated, now,
the lights are off, to myself,
as a lover, or at the cold wind.
Let my poems be a graph
of me. (And they keep
to the line where flesh
drops off. You will go
blank at the middle. A
dead man.
But
die soon, Love. If
what you have for
yourself, does not
stretch to your body?s
end.
(Where, without
preface,
music trails, or your fingers
slip
from my arm
He came back and shot. He shot him. When he came
back, he shot, and he fell, stumbling, past the
shadow wood, down, shot, dying, dead, to full halt.
At the bottom, bleeding, shot dead. He died then, there
after the fall, the speeding bullet, tore his face
and blood sprayed fine over the killer and the grey light.
Pictures of the dead man, are everywhere. And his spirit
sucks up the light. But he died in darkness darker than
his soul and everything tumbled blindly with him dying
down the stairs.
We have no word
on the killer, except he came back, from somewhere
to do what he did. And shot only once into his victim?s
stare, and left him quickly when the blood ran out. We know
the killer was skillful, quick and silent, and that the victim
probably knew him. Other than that, aside from the caked sourness
of the dead man?s expression, and the cool surprise in the fixture
of his hands and fingers, we know nothing.@