The Chicago Prairie Fire
First, I must apologize to the souls of the house
I am wearing the cheek bones of the mask only
Pill bottle, my name is yours
Name tagged on the side of a factory of wrists
Teeth of the mask now
Back of the head of the mask now
New phase of anti-anthropomorphism fending for real faces
Stuck with one of those cultures that believes I chose this family
I am not creative
Just the silliest of the revolutionaries
My blood drying on
my only jacket
just as God got playful
the police state’s psychic middlemen
Evangelizing for the creation of an un-masses
An un-Medgar
Blood of a lamb less racialized
or awesome prison sentence
Good God
Elder-abuse hired for the low
dog eat genius
Right angle made between a point
On a Louisiana plantation
And 5-year old’s rubber ball
3 feet high and falling
like a deportee plane
to complete my interpretation
(of garden variety genocide)
I am small talk
about loving your enemies
A little more realistically
About paper tigers
And also gold…
I need my left hand back
I broke my neck on the piano keys
Found paradise in a fistfight
Maybe I should check into the Cuba line
Watching the universe’s last metronomes
some call Black Jacobins
Just wait…
These religions will start resigning in a decade or two
Some colorfully
Some transactional-ly
In a cotton gothic society
Class betrayal gone glassless/ I mean ironically/ my window started fogging over too
Wondering which Haiti will get me through this winter
Which poem houses souls
Which socialist breakthroughs
Breakthroughs like ten steps back
Then finally stillness
Stillness
Then stillness among families
a John Brown biography takes a bow
I’m up next to introduce Prosser to Monk
I remember childhood
Remember the word “Childhood” being a beginning
Scribbling on an amazing grace
I rented this body from some circumference of slavery
Remember being kicked out of the Midwest
Strange fruit theater
Lithium and circuses
Likeminded stomachs
The ruling class blessing their blank checks with levy foam…
with opioid tea
Sentient dollar bills yelling to each other pocket to pocket
Cello stands in the precinct for accompanying counterrevolutionaries
My mother raised me with a simple pain
A poet loses his mind, you know, like the room has weather
Or first-girlfriend gravity
Police-knock gravity
Mind-game gravity
Or revolution languishing behind
The sugar in my good friend’s mind
“The difference between me and you
Is that the madness
Wants me forever”
A pair of apartments
Defining both my family
And political composure
Books behind my back
Bail money paved into the streets
Playing:
Euphoria
Euphoria
Cliché
Bracing for the medicine’s recoil
Sharing a dirty deli sandwich with my friends
Black Jacobins
Underground topography
Or grandmother’s hands
Psychology of the mask now
Teeth of the mask again
***
Photograph of Tongo Eisen-Martin courtesy of Tongo Eisen-Martin.
