Dispatches from the Land of Erasure #2
Repeated verbatim into the symmetry of sorrow, like an eye
unmoored from its socket, reaching out in assumed relief, or
cumulative agony, the way trauma tethers itself to our ancestry.
Something’s always breathing down our neck, transmitting,
through lineage, a keloid mesh of scars, like an inheritance of
toxic despair, the chemical dirge of flesh once fettered by iron.
******
Pain has an addictive surface of want, generates
need, as it penetrates the flesh.
Pain
as vibrant as a spring that retracts when touched, or
an unending longing, a reverence. The pages of a bible,
that hold between them
the last chlorophyll heartbeats
of a soon-to-be-reaved
dead flower, a sort of prolonged suffering, similar to
momentary joy, or
the scent of determination
given off by the corpses of martyrs.
******
We quibble trivial issues as if they had a life of their own,
even as gunshot splayed children
become the new meta-phor
Black mothers, left to moan immovable denial or cry
into condolence, an ocean to vast to swallow. Where
hurricane punches & levees fail, & people quickly remember
the gospel of Jesus,
or condone earthly violence, whole cities submerged in flood,
but pain bobs to the surface again & again: the body language,
intonations & facial expressions, like treetops jutting from deluge.
******
A repetition of change is gonna come, like
Hope, digging a hole to China with a spoon, is a circular
rhetoric of diminishing returns, proven unreliable
by torturers in black sites, an enemy who uses music as a weapon,
waterboarding, solitary
confinement & humiliation. The inescapable blackness
as in-just-us rains down
onto its most vulnerable spectators, or the token-ized Other, the type
that feels a little safer to Amerikkkans, because, more often
than not, it has a narrative of educational ambition, or can live with
chasing success like a quota. How strenuously they run from
the past, & never expect it to catch up with them.
******
The rock-jawed face of bigotry, as ignorant as those
who believe so zealous, the squee of soup lined
regiment of voters, transfixed in Hope, but waiting for
the other shoe to drop, onto those who do not believe,
who cannot be swayed by representation in absentia: are heathen
blasphemers, heretics, or terrorists. Should be wiped
from the face of the earth, with bullets & bibles, &
Big-Head bucks. The begging braids of starving refugees
hobbled in borderline detention camps, & the needle of hate
spinning
to all points of the compass.
Black Crow Stuck Through A Hole To Freedom
You are the darkest childe. Born into a prison for your mind
you cannot smell or taste or touch. Your body
has no country
but the fugitive boundaries of Diaspora, scribbling sunlight
into the margins of lost horizons. Your cosmology,
a double consciousness, caught in the butterfly effect
of a raptor’s swallow of velocity: Your pain
is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding,
Your electric wings
beating the optimism of Hope into Mama Gospel, or
the gunsmoke Daddy Blues.
You are the darkest childe. The looming shadow
of six crap-shootin’ dope dealers
playin’ the dozens with God. Articulating
the audible, celestial hush of freedom, like a crippled animal
dragging a steel trap.
A line drawn in the sand that enhances the power of explosion,
like a prison beating, or a turning into gunfire.
The rebellion of verbs
be patient . . . waiting under your tongue, signifyin’
the residue of design
within the alchemy of dissent : Two fists,
clenched & raised.
At the ready to swing them,
so they arc through the air, wide as peripheral vision.
Voodoo childe, gone ghetto on they ass!!
The taloned whisper of fear inside your untamed self,
Your body, brandishing jagged edges & moving
parts, like the complications of a pocket watch.
You are the darkest childe. Be patient . . . waiting
for the metaphor’s promise of how it ought to be,
that is now, &
maybe, then,
like trying to reach the next world with a spoon :
Thrust Lever Lift Toss.
Note: Fragment quoted in italics by Kahlil Gibran.
The Third Sermon in The Trumpland
1.
They know the animal
hunger is a wound The hyphenated way
Black folk are reminded of the fear of having nothing
that they don’t belong &
caught in the clockwork gears
of African hyphenated Americans
who have struggled long &
fought hard
ain’t no meta-phor Blackness overwhelming
in its ability to swallow Black folk whole & careen them
into a series of wild behavior
into anger littering Watts So. Central Ferguson streets:
the drunken mouths
of shattered storefront glass & the powerless
second syllable of love-less: a generational live die repeat
uprising from dust The poverty mouths
ashen elbows &
hair-trigger fists like the animal engine
of a larger machine
assembled in Nigger riot & their grief
weeps
the spent tears of the ghosted
the browning blood
pooling the high noon smolder of streets &
the protest signs
scattered between the chants of umbrage &
beaten plastic battalion of buckets
spitting bullets from conjugated throats
like dice rolling from the unclenched fist of God
The blackened Blues
is a dangerous business Telegraphs our bloodlines
from a fog-shrouded telephone-lined
murder of doomsday crows
Constructing a redacted bible Lazarus
from what it feels like
to be Black & rise from a cold sweat
staggered upright
A gravel-throated howl
of voluptuous misery &
bad intention The blown
lightbulb of Hope
when we are most truly aware
of the fearful symmetry
of existence: the crossroad-
dirt handshake of almost colored the sorrow
of many miracle miles from maybe
like We Shall Overcome
from whiskey-broken tongues The mojo workin’
betta’ than it used to be
despite many people
have suffered as much as we have
but none of them was real estate
something
to be bartered with & they
& them saying: it’s blackness
i should fear when it’s the mentally
burdened white folks wit’ guns
doin’ all the killin’ here
filling the world
with the combustion of hate The noun become vindictive
as our blackness & the Blues
like a mouthful of bullets
is a dangerous business
henry 7. reneau, jr. does not Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, or Instagram. It is not that he is scared of change, or stuck fast in the past; instead, he has learned from experience: the crack pipe kills.
–Art by Marcos Lomba