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There is a strange world

in the changing of a light bulb,

the waxing of a bookshelf

I think I could grow by,

as into a dusty dream

in which each day layers

against one just past

and molds the one to come,

content as cabbage

drudging towards harvest.

Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon

in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon

slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth

while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &

Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.

When I was a boy and I sang, my voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest and whatever there was about me that was fragile disappeared when my mouth opened and I let the voice out. We learned, we were prisons for our voices. You could want to try and make sure the door was always open. Be like a bell, Big Eric would say. But he didn’t know. We weren’t something struck to make a tone. We were strike and instrument both. If you can hold the air and shake it to make something, you learn, maybe you can make anything. Maybe you can walk out of here on this thin, thin air.

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.

I’m sure you won’t believe this,

but if a policeman walks behind me, I tremble:

What would Shaft do? What would Shaft do?

Bits of my courage flake away like dandruff.

I’m sweating even as I tell you this.

I’m not cool.

I keep the real me tucked beneath a wig,

I’m a small American frog.

I grow beautiful as the theatre dims.