what point should i make of justice
if they say beauty and love are dead?
if I plan to drink to the oblivion of dancing,
why then must i wait on the coming
of noon?
there are red rooms filled with seductive
questions, playing music painful and pensive,
with corners of moving diagonal lights, sharing
lyrics you can sing but not explain, refrains
you can repeat but not remember. interested,
i wish to attend…
but I am being ushered to the white open scene
crowded with well-spoken gestures towards conclusions
and commonalities incommensurate of the mutual
and the deferring.
but it is said that everything is political;
therefore, i must follow.
but
what is the appeal of their imperatives on my behalf
if the eros of their desires is merely progressive?
why must i, after all, still have to jump on board—of their ships?
what distinguishes the imperative from the imperial?
why do they discourage me from lingering in thought and indecision?
where is my neither/nor? tired,
i wish to decline…
but i am being judged for keeping my time and my
scars, and my freedom, and my loves, in the dreams
of my flesh; the dreams of my flesh dressed in skin
and the urgency of history they compel me to write.
while the history of Being, they compel me to leave
to the work of old white men and their sons as
their daughters review my submission with the
utmost scrutiny for clarity.
[to whom it may concern: i wish to stretch
these black hands and seize the authority of Being.
do you represent black authors of Being who
write more than history but the wholestory
of Being? my story is semi-autobiographical. it
is set in a not-so-distant future with a protagonist
caught under the final moments of crumbling arches.
ancient arches, weathered, beaten, rusted; the shape of
heaven’s original distance, now surrendering a fetal
diastema not too scandalized to reach for the black
of my eyes. its embryonic principle of insufficient
reason draws my eyes upwards following the length
of each expiring leg, calling me, reaching for my eyes
to draw up, upwards; to trace the former supremacy made
trophic and entangled by the rendering of my dis-covering
taken to the point of succeeding the old, abstracted
measures of the vaunt and shape of those occluded heights.
now dis-covering the frayed veil of its incomprehension;
now surpassing the repeated measures of its unlimited loft;
now clapping eyes on the expensive vacancy of its darkened corners
protected from the broadcast of the sun’s general light;
finally exposed to fertile eyes able to look the aging
terror in the face with generational tears and dreams streaming down
announcing the words: i see images of men and women walking,
returning from the sun hand in hand. they look wounded and real,
and see how beautiful their strides strive to be.]
but
why am i judged as a rake for asking her to make it a double
after receiving another letter of rejection from them?
why is my style hardly legible and my eclecticism high-risk?
why do i have to fit in, and they are discovered to break ground?
why am i flowery, and they literary?
why is it hostile if i look my contradiction in the eye and say
you are not my equal, nor my counterpart, nor my ally despite
how many t-shirts and coffee mugs and yard-signs and reposts
you share with your lover and friends in those circles
you guard now declaring to all that my life
clearly matters since none of your lovers or friends
in those circles you guard at those tables you host,
passing brie and chic laughter, would find
your announcements redundant or sexy,
only political, merely correct,
merely relevant.
and so
i am judged for growing bored
of the talk, and the speeches, and the promises, and
the rage, and the voting, and the correctness, and
the corrections, and the censorships
of what is beauty, and song, and humanity, and existence,
and me.