another poem with a title

DeCrowned
Boy, you need to go on and cut your hair. You look so handsome with your hair cut.
Don’t nobody want to see them ugly ass naps in your head.
Your kitchen is all jacked up. Look at all them peas you got cookin’ back there.
Them shits’ll go to poppin’ when that comb get to ‘em.You can’t get no job with your head lookin’ all kinds of ways.
Don’t nobody want a nigga with a nappy head,
I promise you.

I keep tellin’ you to comb your goddamn hair,
but your silly ass don’t listen. Don’t no white man want to give you no job no way.
All you doin is makin’ it easier for him. You givin’ him the perfect excuse to kick your monkey ass to the curb.
Don’t say a nigga never told you nothin’.
You know a nigga speak the truth.

My thoughts steadily move towards devotion
as my words carry out pitiable prayers
to God and Family
though these oaths are breaking

                                                                   Begging for


                   
where to go (where not to go)



                                                                                or

                                                what to say (what not to say)
or

how to be (how not to be)

but I don’t ( I do, I really do)
                                                              so

                                                                                                  kill me now (let me live)


                               kill me now (let me stay)


                                                                                                   kill me now (let me love)





                                                              kill me now (let me die)

My lover marked me
with purple,
instead of red,
so that I might
be buried deep
in obfuscation,
a night with neither
moon nor
stars.

In my new guise
of blue bruises
and blossoming
welts,
emerged infectious
twin-spirited blasphemies:

the occult—
pair bonded swans
and blackened dancers’ feet

the romantic—
stabbings of the cochlea,
burning petals of the lotus


The obvious—
curdled milk,
the sweet stench of fresh shit
a pus filled wound

are fact without deeper consideration,
horrific and disgusting
which neither
the occult
or the romantic
can afford to be

only  
revealing themselves
with unseen calm brushes against the skin,
like cockroaches flying in rooms
with the lights turned off.

Colors stain the field. A magnolia tree

vibrates through its center with a quieting

rustle reigning over a neighborhood

desperately trying to be saved from decay.

Lone travelers are silent in their crumbling troubles,

they blight the space before the house of the cross,

rounded by the purple veil that grace its arms.

The patrons trickle in with their black crowns

and capes of white, breathing glad tidings

for a new morning allowed to their old bones.

Their faith is love, tested and refined,

but possibly chiming

passionate solitude

made into a cage

of brilliance. 

I picked up a
strange tape box when my daddy
was moving things
out of his storage unit.

Depicted on it in many separate frames
was an orgy,
though that word would not come for some time.

Sex was already
in my vocabulary
because I looked it up
in the dictionary,
along with penis ( ding-a-ling )
and vagina (           ).
I wrote those words
as much as possible
so I could have
them in my imagination,
like griffin and unicorn.

Playboy showed me sex
before the tape box,
but only in the form of vanilla duets,
rather than as hypnotizing
bacchanal ( an episode
of Hercules: the Animated Series)

Picking cotton
is plucking
the white rose.

Both gnarl
the hands
with sharply
drawn scars
as they’re
bequeathed unto others
and not the hands
that pick them.