The thing about facing your fears head on
is it only really works on TV. As an example, let’s say
a clawfoot bathtub teeming with arachnids

is your garden variety anti-fantasy.
Now, say the sitcom dad in you gets the itch
to do something experiential, something special

for your 40th (stay with me), so you willingly
dive into a pool of 10,000 tarantulas, head-
first. In the Fear Factor version

of this midlife episode, Ludacris is like
Man, white people are crazy.
In reality, this sounds like a frightful fucking

headache, six ibuprofen & stitches.
Like 80,000 eyeballs all up in your situation,
if you catch my drift. & I bet,

the last thing you need is a group of hairy
climbers, & their many-legged offspring,
ogling your property. Sniffing up the ol’ oak tree

after the acorns you squirreled away
for the fam when the market was healthy.
Square any beef between two parties

& you’ll find money lurking somewhere
near the root. Of evil & fear,
Aristotle claimed, pain arises

from the untoward bracing.
He strikes me as a particularly
anxious dude. Extreme fear can neither

fight nor fly. But comply, I think
Shakespeare implied.
The thing about facing your fears head on

is your head &
the knowledge of history. From an aerial
vantage, a battlefield

of sun-blanched skulls
resembles one psychedelic mushroom patch.
Can you see the speckled gecko playing hide & seek

with the ravenous Komodo dragon,
weaving through 2 million cavernous eye sockets?
Or am I just deep in my spacesuit bag?

If it helps, you may think of this figure as figurative—
a literal marker in the definition’s landscape
representing blacks slain

during the Transatlantic Slave Conquest.
Or perhaps Greek tragedy begets your literary
empathy. When Ray Parker Jr. sang

“I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” he didn’t account for
the Great-Great-Granddaddy Apparition
of Social Studies. My fear of history is a valid fear

of Power—stripped, lorded over, misguided—
corrupting one’s sense
of need in favor of excess. Head to head, bird to

nest, I’m saying I understand what steers our national
stasis, our fossilized political animals, & I
forgive us. As an example of forgiveness, let’s say

I had money to produce this
40 Acres & a Mule script with Spike Lee. As in
reality, the narrative’s of little consequence.

But peep the plot-twist ending:
Marques, our handsome protagonist
attorney (stay with me),

wins a class action suit
to the tune of lifetime therapy
for everybody.

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