Pennies for the Opera
Our perfect confidence in the sun
In commemoration
every tambourine a thousand miles in every direction
playing in a California rent party
rattlers dancing and bleeding over God’s non-whitened skin
waiting for the cornfield to shrug
we are forgetful
but your ancestors nevertheless
slowing down the poem to the speed of sweet light
the speed of bedless deaths
the bones of fast friends near a pile of first fruits
a pile of imperialist failings
oppressor and oppressed give their guns the same nickname
underground working-class sort of goes back to school
sort of studies revolution
The summer belongs to itself now
As does a sharecropper’s God
As does the death mask
Real advice from Malcolm
Real rose chords over my Memphis skeleton
a tenor part before dying
playing to our waning blood pressure
our penny-plated gun (the last of the spacetime) tucked
white people would have sold us standing naked on anything
sold us off a huge garden crystal
or peacock feather
would have sold us off of a stack of
doo-wop records if they could
would have sold us off of the
perfection of the cosmos
Forestry of drug paraphernalia
Suburb spikes in the grass
Syringe jungle like a sick bed’s sick bed
execution needle that became a society’s bottleneck
Preamble noose-talk
or nuclear scientist thanked for their work
Activists who don’t scream Black power/rather Black component
A painful season
Season gone sentient
and well-dressed
taken as a whole
taken in puppet skin
a sentient Sunday that married fifteen sticks of dynamite
we are houseless now
and dancing our waistlines into a courtroom floor
Atlantic ocean throwing my voice into the city weeds
City weeds of the other other confederacy
I would double down on this poem
on this gang friendship
signs of apocalypse in all directions
I would run this poem into the ground
on my fifth skipped meal
“today, Lord, we become even better friends”
dollar store notebooks in a mass context
pen cap full of bullets
California color line as played out with necro protest types who sleep on the other other earth
While
We are waiting to shoot on a muralist’s behalf
This waiting to shoot: an old man’s truancy of sorts
or tear stain on a Panther pamphlet
houseless bookseller speaking about little Bobby the conqueror
A crisis of open-air corrections
Chemical extradition
And war songs wearing off
Around the corner from South Texas
You pretended that prison is a river
You married your american cop
Black skin/white mantras
Like normal-speed bullets changing a normal life
Like walking back to the united states in defeat
Notes:
This is part of a portfolio of work that appeared in Poetry’s December 2020 issue and is excerpted from Carving Out Rights from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex (Hat & Beard Press, 2020), a collection of poems and essays about human rights accompanied by foam block prints of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by artists at Stateville Prison, edited by Tara Betts, Aaron Hughes, and Sarah Ross. Find the rest of the portfolio here.
Source: Poetry (December 2020)