I listened to my grandfather
sing in a rusted tongue.
His sharpest tool was tomorrow.
The ice cream man’s song
was my jam;
I’d jump the low,
leaning fence surrounding the yard,
slapping the light pole as I went by.
At night, young men
huddled under the yellow light,
their pants sagging,
their homemade tattoos
thickening with age.
I laughed at how
their underwear in jowls
hung past their belt,
at the broken belt loops
toothed with dirt.
Me and my primas played
under the kitchen light,
our bodies bumping against the table,
tipping the chilies and spilling the salt.
Outside, blue and red rotated
on the sheet over the window,
the tied ends on the curtain rod
flickered like Christmas
while cruisers converged
and black men ran and slid
across hoods. When
everyone was braceleted,
cops talked into their shoulders
in squawks and pauses,
picked up the spilled pockets
and tipped-over bottles,
laughing as they nudged
the boys against
the hoods of their cars.
6.
I shall wear my Chuck Taylors
beige guts aglow,
crease my khakis
to a sharp shank.
I will swing first
or shoot my mouth
at any tremble
of trouble.
A bandana grows
from the soiled edges
of my right pocket. Look how
it grows. Look.
When the moon slicks the night
motherly, me and my boys nibble
our beer bottles. And know
the slant of pride, the hubris
of a first tattoo: walking shirt off, chest out,
the edges raised on a fresh brocade of name.
And my family didn’t recognize pride:
being a father before seventeen,
running in a black gang, and
losing my tongue— burying it in the dirt of our yard.
When brought home in the back of cruisers,
lights let the neighbors in—on what was up.
7.
Tonight I can write the most violent lines,
maim the beautiful, misprision the sublime,
decapitate rhyme with chiming execution,
kidnap with the prolonged rip and break of poems;
tonight, in the rain, in anger, I violence lines.
Write, for example, the eyes are starry,
when fists blue and shiver off the distance.
The night, in anger, scratches out the sky.
On a night like this, on a hospital bed, I squinted
under the upmost light, stitched and stitched again,
a stethoscope swayed in the ventilated air.
I scratched the air trying to chase it away.
Tonight I write from a foxhole of hate.
To think I have slipped in this docile skin.
The sounds fall in from the street, chased in.
What does it matter the night has healed,
a scar shines in the sky, a scar shines on my head.
That is all. The night is filled with holes.
I rifle my memory, nothing but
the same light whitening my head;
the art of shame so short and healing so long.
I don’t love them anymore, that’s certain, but how I loved them;
so much, my fists tried to ride the wind from their teeth.
On nights like this, I too, made women
mountains to climb, flowers to pick, giants to nuzzle
but, I too, have seen my grandmother wrinkled
with realization, white tears falling from
the lines of her face and her unpinned hair,
how all she could do was chop onions
when love and silently turning the cheek
couldn’t stop uncles from touching nieces.
8.
As a boy I died
into silent manhood.
I hid the words
teachers helped me find.
People always pine for the ease
of an earlier time, when life
was lunch-boxed with fruit
in the water fountain line,
so much explained during recess time.
I hid the words teachers helped me find.
I spoke in the twist
of fingers to gang signs.
In the color of shoe laces
or which way my brim was tilt,
I hid the words teachers
helped me find.
9.
At nine
years old
I sat in
understudy
at the bar,
worshiping
Shirley Temples.
Grandpa smiled
and said
Let’s go
as I chewed
a maraschino,
Dante’s devil,
a cherry
in nine
rings of ice.
I finished
the meat,
threw down
the stem.