I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows—

she rides a wild pony for my birthday,

a white pony on the seventh floor.

“And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!”

the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.

At the center of my life: my mother dances,

yes here, as in childhood, my mother

asks to describe the stages of my happiness—

she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:

between the regiments of saucers and towels,

she moves so fast—she is motionless,

opening and closing doors.

But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!

My mother's past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.

I drew an axis through the afternoon

to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language—

young, not young—my mother

gallops a pony on the seventh floor.

She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens

what is shut, shuts what is open.

Go Ju go Ju go.

Lightskinned Rainbow

eclipsed Tick Tock,

his chocolate walk-partner.

Incestuous Pootchie and Tan.

Both Frogs. Squirrel. Crazy ass Sponge.

Bama Duke’s lopsided,

sticky daughter, Peaches.

Out b-shaped barber,

Blinky. We miss you,

Missy, rest in peace.

John Rocks-on-Rocks.

The Young Dillingers.

Freckles versus Baby Tim.

Cabalou stuttering,

i-m-m-mi-t-ta-ting Johnny Lips.

Hillbilly, Lefty, Itchy and Skip.

Dootie Bug’s first

baby’s mama, leaving.

Tootie had Fin.

Explosive posters lit at night.

On every tree a cardboard saviour

Nailed to rooted echoes of wooden agony.

Sidewalks graffitied with chalk silhouettes,

Stank of murder, scabs of moonlight

Patch our wounded night.

Wrapped in bandaged blue, pale morning

Wakes the day. Mute doses

Of evaporating darkness on the breath of potholes.

You load, focus, aim.

The shutter falls like a tiny axe,
Reopens, a blinking eye washed in light.

An image enters the world

Premature, wet, lit like a miracle. The holier ones

Exploit darkness, develop like secrets.

Only the faithful possess

Nerve enough to stand this long, arms crossed,

Fearlessly posed, in the line of fire.

Every shot attempts to capture

The will-to-survive of its target:

High-top fades, hooded sweats, hard stares,

A Gucci background, a wicker chair.

Gruel, crumbs on a table

of ice, a labyrinth of snow:

and infinite distances

in the small box of the kitchen.

Mother chopped pieces

of her heart into the skillet.

Brother and I heard oil sizzle

until we huddled in shame.

She salted the meat with tears.

She cried if we ate

and cried if we refused to eat,

warning You’ll go hungry.

Admit it. You hate the body

because it can be broken,

stabbed, shot full of holes.

And so you become a butcher.

Say the spirit cannot be broken.

Say you see better than anyone

how fiercely an ox, a hog, a cock

fights to stay alive, until the end.

You wonder how nothing seems

to stop this rat: sucking, gnawing

through cement walls to snatch

scraps of gristle – not knowing

what you need to kill, or why.

Beat it with a shovel: skin-slither,

pestle of skull and will. Admit

it shamed you to cover with dung.

I don’t mean to make you cry.

I mean nothing, but this has not kept you

From peeling away my body, layer by layer,

The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills

With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of the pursuit.

Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.

Hunt all you want. Beneath each layer of mine

Lies another skin: I am pure onion – pure onion

Of outside and in, surface and secret core.

Dear Yu Honor

Yu may rmember me when yu visits prison

here I am Walter Boyd Leadbelly #42738

yo best big niger from Sugarland Farm

wit my stella guitar and songs yu like

I play it all like a black machine for yu loud an slow

Down in the valley    What a frend we have in

Jesus an I Sugarland shuffle like pickin cotton far as

eye cn see I need my freedom like yu said yu was gone give me

yur honor all I need a second chance rmembr me

yu sed I was som niger   som niger need they pardon

GOVERNOR

thank yu for yo kind kind hand yo wisdum.

Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

This country needs a Columbus like me.

I have sighted a dark territory

to map, mount, and measure: its fat, prickly

fruit weighed for value and veracity.

I stake my claim on the breath of each Black

willing to open his mouth and spit out

southern legend’s soiled roots. I will blue

the pale ears of Ivy League lecture halls

with secrets snatched from between Negro jaws.

They seek primitive man’s oracle,

covet my careful codification

of these ethereal chants born from strife,

the way I pen it down in black on white

page and bid it dance; the feral language

of a folk bent and broken as the notes

grinding up through marrow and memory.

Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

   i am disturbed and distressed at   this man messin’ with my music,

            his beginning to show off    preachin’ how a songster gotta be pure

                    in his songs and talk   —like he got a deed to folkways,

              when his money value is    the way blues sweats out a man

                                           to be     like prayer

                       natural and sincere   set free from smotherin’

            as he was while in prison:    in a solitary cell.

                                      of course,  fact is,

                 as this tendency grows,  this two time jailbird loser –

                   he will lose his charm   he ain’t ‘bout to lose nerve, too,

                                         and become only an

                                       ordinary,   old timey,

                                 low ordinary    busted out,

                                         harlem    countrified

                                                  nigger.

Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.

Snake dreams uncoil,

                        burrow into the spine of books.

Night spills from cracked eggs.

Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.

We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.

When the fire turns

I lotion my arms

The woman weaves a storm design

Smells rain in the canyon floor

The wind in winter sleeps between our fingers

During prayer

It is released and blows into town

A swarm of locusts with wings on fire

This house burns clumps of cumulus against its back.

Blisters in the core of a dime rubbed on my neck,

like rubbing the hood of a ’57 Chevy with a bar of soap.

Or turtle shells on powder-scented rocks in a tub of lemon juice.

Black pearls dipped in salt sink into my chest.

Teapot hisses.

            A cheetah has been pulled from its skin.

…what of the glowing spine,

what of the toy stings of stock footage flames,

what of the jets you swatted dead

from the air with unmistakable joy,

you of the plastic-leather, pebbled Pleistocene flesh,

you of the palsied fury, you

of the put-upon by dissemblers and disturbers,

you, what of the life burned

so cheaply into celluloid we are charmed…

Imagine if each time we kissed

my ear fell off. If the morning

was not so much for brushing

the fog of the night from the mouth,

but reassembly. You might go

out into the day with my bad ankle.

I’d never hear the end.

Let’s eat something no sane person would eat

and in the dark with our zealous fingers

like savages. Each rich subterranean rind

or wheel of cheese we’ll pretend

to fluently call forth from greater darkness

than this. Avatars of avarice, open

mouth to sautéed cephalopods

and crusted crustaceans and bivalves over braziers,

let’s swell until the dawn

like storm clouds, like stomachs, like stolid

hunger.

Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.

Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving

eastward, indiscriminate, original.

Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,

our nature disobediently tends toward nature.

I hate you truly. Truly I do.

Everything about me hates everything about you.

The flick of my wrist hates you.

The way I hold my pencil hates you.

The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped

     in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.

Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

That the water was transformed, yes, a miracle, but

that the resultant wine was good – ah, conviction,

sensing the presence of divinity in the guest

who exclaims to the host but you’ve saved the best

for last! – to smell a god in the mother asking her son

please, do something or the party will be ruined, ruined!