Explore Poems: Allusion

...walk into a bar in America.
Butterworth says, I’m being repackaged.
Ben says, I’m being rebranded.
Jemima says, I remember
when they branded my mama     on her back.

The bartender says, I could stand in the middle
of Main Street and kill somebody
and I wouldn’t...

For me, the movie starts with a black man
Leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons

Catching the sheen of his perfect black afro.
Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops

On their backs. It starts with the swagger,
The cool lean into the...

How horrible it is, how horrible
that Cronenberg film where Goldblum’s trapped

with a fly inside his Material
Transformer: bits of the man emerging

gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly
worrying that his agent’s screwed him—

I almost flinch to see the body later
that’s left its...

1.
After the beginning of the gallop, there are counts when the horse is in the air, her
legs withdrawn, a diamond shape.

This is called suspension.

2.
Her name is Sallie Gardner.

She’s by Vandal, out of Charlotte Thompson, Kentucky bred, of Irish pedigree, a
Birdcatcher.

Now...

Crip (noun): slang for a disabled person/the whole of
     the disabled community/
a school of thought
Example: “I’m on crip time” 
Meaning: Time bends differently when the universe that is
     my body dictates it 

Crip (noun): a Black gang that originated in...

I am
a product
of my time.
Time is a body
that resembles
a sound without a scale.
Forever foreclosed fortitude.
In heaven, the dinner bell rings
as elegy. The porch-light stars turn
on their mothering moths. Betrayal
takes at least two, and wherever two
or more are gathered, I am...

I turn on the radio and hear voices, girls becoming women after tragedy. Talk about dreams! His heart was covered in a thin shell the color of moon and when touched, I grew old. The best movies have a philosophy...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,

Some are transformed just once
And live their whole lives after in that shape.
Others have a facility
For changing themselves as they please.

I think there was a movie once
where Frankenstein fell in love with a vampire.
A small mummy at first interfered
but later provided the requisite necessary
clarifications. He can only
meet you at night. Her face
is scarred in a permanent expression
of doom, but her...

In the hiding
hour of autophagy
ghosts hang out all day and talk to us.
An archival haunting demanding tribute:
     half a lime for breakfast every day.
بشرٌ يئنّونَ من الألمِ
human voices keening in pain
تُشعلُ أجسادَهُمَ النارُ
their bodies, consumed by fire
light up the...

How odd that she would die into an August
night, I would have thought
she would have gone out in a pale clear
night of autumn, covered to the shoulder
in an ivory sheet, hair
fanned out across the pillow perfectly.
Fame will go by, and,...

The wish to climb a ladder to the loft
Of God dies hard in us. The angels Jacob saw

Were not himself. Bramble is what grows best
Out of this man-scarred earth, and I don’t chop it back

Till the fruit have ripened. Yesterday I...

i.
 
Dog. The time you take home, the time you take away from home.
The insistence, the instance worried at with your thick tongue.
 
Stink. Because of what you found on the ground and put in your gut.
Harry. As in beset, or beast....

My sweat soaked the sheets.

You used to be like everyone else

but then

the way you hurt me (fingers, teeth):

I grew accustomed to it

then I craved it

then I got bored

and other men tried to put death into my mouth.

Angelic Richie with bite...

The geometer wishes he were David
cut from stone by lightning, his mind

gyring wide into figures of space
out of time, ever gauging the shock

of the word for the pathos, ever
slinging the rock of his wound

at the sugared glass of me.
I'd rather...

On the edge of a pasture in a confusion of stones,
obscured by the long grass and floramour,
the footprint of horror cloven and drawn.
She had a beautiful name: freedom.
Pretty little chop. Unmarketable, light
the bleating of new life.

He loved her mouth, tiny...

memory first what
f-a-b-r-i-c  weave thread thin thick many
weave-shimmer magic
me-jaw-drop how-how-how

memory second what
people big-mouth-talk-my-face
me born deaf why
me bother deaf not

memory third what
l-o-o-m tall big
{stripe-down up-stripe-front}
look-like door magic

me want toy regular-regular play
no-no-no
w-a-r-p favorite toy
sometimes l-o-o-m weight fun too

threads slender same-same r-e-e-d-s
me-grow-up same-same
every-day...

A dreadful darkness closes in
                     On my bewildered mind;
O let me suffer and not sin,
                     Be tortured yet resigned.

Through all this world...

I. 
The question is not how like the animals we are
But how we got that way. We laugh, for what is a suicide note
 
But the epitaph of an emotion? Few of us die out in the open;
And when you say thesis,...