The Book of Yeezus

By Julian Randall
After Kehinde Wiley, with a line from Danez Smith

Michael  Jackson’s not even Black     He’s a forgetting

No forgiveness in the wild     Still     the almost-crown a profanity

Of orchids     Summer and summer and the air rancid

With several wars    too old to name    and I’m told

Too old to end    There are histories worth dying for

But none of them are history yet    Several flights stranded

The knife shrouded by its own predictable vanity

Soft basilica of an iris    King of swoon and deniability

Bleached    Conditional planet    as if the moon were merely a draft

Of need    The king the king the king    My mother    has been betrayed

By so many colors    I forget the polarity of desire sometimes

There are whole years where the light dares to wound the blade

Where I am from    whiteness is    Conditional    if/then    Still

A fever of magnolias    Forever Foreverever    Foreverever

I don’t know much about the future    but I’m offended

To be in it more often than I am not    Summer by any metric

I am starting to believe that certain miles are irredeemable

It’s a beautiful day to tell my mother I once aspired to kill myself

I can’t even get that right    The once    as if this were conditional

I know too much about desire to believe myself    Forgiveness

Is a kind of property    meaning there are so many ways that I can’t

Afford it    Religion is a labor told in long cursives of sweat

It’s how I’ve learned forgiveness and exhaustion wear the same face

In most histories    I wound and wound until everything

In me is the same bad    Consistency is a kind of virtue when your name

Is already a form of bondage    No noun is safe    So where do you gold from

In the country where gold is almost a verb?    Vengeful as I’ve learned to be

Bright as the silence that citizens the gap between armor and its namesake

Inevitability    at the end of everything    one last form of governance

O    the indignity of after

                                                                                     I don’t forgive it

O how grief will be the last thing we do together

                                                                                     I won’t forgive it

I told her everything about the train    Long metal yawn    on a loop

Despair gleams like anything desperate enough to make a name

Forgetting gravity      My mother vitiligo’d like a king or at least white

As an open secret    I asked for doves but my grammar is parched of wings

At the moment    My mother who once told me I would rather kill you myself

Than let a man kill me    over a man I invited    God is what you make happen

Still    a loop fails to keep a voice alive forever    Carceral Instinct Champagne Moon

Mississippi Summer    What if what gives me the capacity for mercy

Is knowing what I’d give to leave memory?

I’m not always looking for love    just something to hold me

The way Winter accommodates the mutiny of Spring

Niggas better recognize    I’m God    No touch is more dangerous to me than me

I gild my teeth electric with elegy    Every king becomes king after a failure of kings

King me    in the country between us    All the wars are quiet
Notes:

Audio version performed by the author.

Source: Poetry (November 2022)