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Breathing Room 

There are lives twice as long as others; 

they might look back on those 

behind them like runners nearing 

the finish line relieved 

not to have been out of it so early. 

We wake one day to an understanding 

about our diminishment yet 

by evening, we’ve turned that corner— 

the present is everything; its tedium 

flaring in the window’s reflection. 

You get tired of being this way. 

Plans go awry & other plans 

get made elsewhere, somewhere 

elaborately empty. Still, we believe

ourselves slightly beautiful as we check 

the door then fill the bedside glass, 

means of accumulation mastered, 

our complaint well turned. 

Unheard behind that window, the night sky— 

boundless—still roars.

One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”

My father believes that the United States is destined one day to be engulfed in a socialist revolution. All revolutions are bloody, he says, but this one will be the bloodiest of them all. The working class—which includes me—will at some point in the not-so-distant future decide to put down the tools of our trade, pour into the streets, beat the police into submission, take over the means of production, and usher in a new epoch—the final epoch—of peace and equality. This revolution is not only inevitable, it is imminent. It is not only imminent, it is quite imminent. And when the time comes, my father will lead it.

Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable.

And we divorced in the survives            and O

It was a comedy            and first you ever slept with me

And marry me and marry me and O

How fat I used to be