From: The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009)

swarthy poet, your mouth a beautiful something of homemade

brooms for darkish dirt in darkish rooms. you hock your spit,

work dirt into mud

to sling, mud to shape into beautiful somethings and useful:

spirituals slanging escape routes. piñatas

full of good medicine.

red tandoors buried deep and bullish. and above all useful,

with all the etcs. of suicide/uplift;

requisite beauty

of indelible tans

and rising, even from the briny these lava rocks.

even from blank graves

these painted ghosts. even from the burbs these barbecue smokes. this is good

work. above all, work that doesn’t code shift

or sport permanents,

cravats; but rolls up its sleeves like those who basketball shoe,

cotton, orange, diamond, tobacco, java,

sweat to buy mother-tongue

off layaway, you who replay the way grandmama wore

her hair indigenously, folk funk of pots, tattoos

and songs your uncles hung out

like dirty laundry. dig them up and use them to beat your people

into new songs. righteous art is a rod.

rods are very useful.

photograph the gouges your men made. blow them up. zoom on

the welts the women dealt. use no firewater,

needles, crack, no opium.

do this in ghettoes, behind sweatlodges and mountaintop dojos.

but if you decide, at last, you must break through,

there are explorers out

to discover, listening for voices to lomax,

dialects to misinterpret and surfaces

for new flags and maps.

they seek porters for jungle idylls, guides with machetes

and hoodoo to help them escape Uncle Sam, the Son

of Sam, Columbus,

Columbine, Mandingo, Manzanar—all our history’s

bright foundries of burning skin. if you choose to help them

lose their bulging baggage

in swarthy airports and drive them to where they feel at home,

know then who might call your work beautiful,

above all, useful.