Explore Poems: Popular Culture

late, in aqua and ermine, gardenias
scaling her left sleeve in a spasm of scent,
her gloves white, her…

& Memphis is out in Full Fang!
Skeletons skip down our pitted streets.
Whole families with matching hobo stipple
roam tragicomically through the sprawling
candy deserts: polka-dot bandanas
on sticks, flapping Chaplinesque shoes.

Unclaimed pumpkins pile high
behind razor wire. The air's thick
with caw & trouble. Our...

“I’m here for the show” the man said
looking under Frank's shirt for the door

“I’m no theater” Frank said

a line formed

must he admit them all?

many had umbrellas

a blind woman
waited with
her dog

“it’s gonna be a great show” someone said
“but when’s he gonna...

...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...

I wear a flower in my lapel.
I like the sweetness of its lie in my nose.
A carnation, the fool’s flower,

its heart a wilting empire.
In late-night editing sessions,
I imagine I’m planting flowers

in the sockets of eyes. Whatever helps
me reach our rigor...

“You can’t kiss a movie,” Jean-Luc Godard said, and this is mostly true, in that you cannot initiate the kiss. The Movie could initiate the kiss if The Movie wanted, as it is so much taller, leaning in, no way...

It is natural to live in an era
             when no one uttered––
and silence was glamour

so I could cast one glance westward
             and you’d know what I was
going to kill. Murder...

The lit night glares like a day-glo strawberry,
the stakeout car beside the hydrant is full of feds,
and the ikon of our secret hero(ine?), atop the
feckless funnypaper mesa we try to live in, is that
poor dumb indestructible super-loser Krazy Kat.

O Innocence,...

Rotor wash, or the downward-flowing
Air by which our helicopters formed
Imprints in the jungle grass beneath
Now stands effectively for Vietnam
Because our understanding of that war
Omitted many things but not the wind
We bowed our heads and fled. In this case we

Refers effectively...

Love is boring and passé, all that old baggage,
the bloody bric-a-brac, the bad, the gothic,
retrograde, obscurantist hum and drum of it
needs to be swept away. So, night after night,
we sit in the dark of the Roxy beside grandmothers
with their shanks...

Delirium in the downtown mall today:
      Burt Reynolds! All the henna-haired girls
            sneer, while their mothers, enthralled, say,

“I saw you in this, I saw you in that–
      you were marvelous, simply...

Spike Lee is so small I didn’t even
see him at first, surrounded

by Black Expo goers like a gumdrop
in a fist. When I asked him to sign

my “Free South Africa” t-shirt,
he said, You didn’t buy that at this

booth. Fresh off seeing Do...

                                                            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,

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,...

How many sets of her parents are dead. How many times over is she an orphan. A plane, a crosswalk, a Boer war. A childbirth, of course, her childbirth. When she, Shirley Temple, came out of her mother, plump even...

you know I ain’t mess w/you ’cause of yo’ friends
wouldn’t have you caught slummin’
know you hood 'cause you said

I look the same
and I said
you look the same

and I said “it don’t crack, doit?
and you said “Uh, OKAY?”

that’s that thing right...

She lip-syncs “Hello God,” then “9 to 5.”
She struts. Or does she fly? Like the soul,
a rhinestone, she tells us, will never die.
She’s a blush-pink Bible. Patched together,
she’s a cosmic doll. Mirror of a mirror,
she winks, her face the only...

your only
teachers

are the movies
and lovers

and lovers
are like movies

only old ones
stir desire

This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...