Three Odes

By David E. Patton

© David E. Patton
Patton’s Post April 2009

davidepatton@sbcglobal.net

can I be your poet?

Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca

O Federico, now long in the limbs of your death the boys who set by the big muddy
Mississippi river and dreams that the river is nude are damned by the selfish love of the
would be misunderstood righteous bastards who people the eight corners of the cross,
damned to Hell to Purgatory
To the Naraka of the Buddhist
To the Dya of China
To the Duat of Egypt
To the Niflheim of Germany
To the Hades of Greece
To the Jahannam of Islam
To the Jigoku of Japan
To the Gehennom of Judaism
To the Yomi of the Shinto

O Federico, the river is forever making love to the banks that runs like children caught in
the shadow of the moon and your statue in the Plaza de Santa Ana is suffering from the
depression of a red kerchief used to blow the nose of an evil butterfly

O Federico, only the worms knows where your body is to be found where between cities
are your bones still I shall tell you what is up. The Blacks are at it again mining the
history of the Whites to fit in.

O Federico, the boys in their wedding grown are making love to the psychedelic fantastic
realism of the machines that calls our names while the wheat fields are attacking the
crows dressed up in their Sunday feathers, only the best for the best.

O Federico, only the Blackbirds knows the secret hiding place of the mid night Sun God
that war against the stars when the sky falls and collect in the gutter where the homeless
are fishing, but the wisdom of the rain will not feed them, will not fend for them, will not
issues its cleaning praises heard above the insistence propaganda of thunder.

O Federico, the boys are going home from the midnight last call wounded by the
alcoholic art of the drunken poets who have given over their sex to the denial of the
church that Jesus smelled his own musk in the desert walk and longed for the flesh of
other when nobody slept. No-no nobody is asleep beneath the cooling heat of the light of
misplaced stars, no-no nodody.

O Federico, the river is bloated like a known nude corpse long in the bourbon color water
where turtles are nibbling at the knees of a quiet pain and the shadows of trees are
dancing in the rain to the dehumanized music of machines use to keep us young and sane.

O Federico, Dya exist in the eye of a butterfly

Naraka exist in the bodies of worms
Duat can be found in the blood soaked proboscis of mosquitoes
Niflkeim exist in the mist of a fart traveling through the body of a dark cloud hung from
the stars.
The deep body of Tartarus exists in the place within the manifested yawning void of the
holy chaos of a lost God beating his cross against the primordial night, three layers deep
that it can not weep or fight back against the assault of the moon.
Diyu is imprisoned by Yanlao Wang who also imprison the Devil until the time he atone
for the greedy sin of the sane who pitch a penny to the homeless drunk on the rain and
dancing down the Shirley Temple stairs beside the dark foot steps of a hoofer wide eyed
ya! Federico, the black are at it again with wide grins and bugged eyes the stereotyped
southern draw dancing the jazzy Hot Mikado.
O Federico, the sky is sweating into the river that brush against St. Louis along Broadway
where muddy white kids are dreaming of Bo jangles running backward in a forward
world.

O Federico, the machines are at it again eating the flesh of workers who have made
money and credit the new found God whose breath smells of plastic and oil mined off
shore in the gulf of disbelief where the water is stained and stagnate by the blue breath of
fishes washed a shore to be a play thing to boys who care nothing for the sex to be found
under the skirts of girls dreaming of changing their minds and the natural aperture of their
sexual appetites.

O Federico, the Whites are at it again enslaving the rivers that runs like vein in the body
of mosquitoes sucking the blue blooded notion that the poor are poor because someone
has to be lost in the economic currency of the state.

O Federico, O Garcia Lorca, O proud poet who hid your sex in the button up coat of a
brown skin night walking the dingy dark streets of Madrid where the Manzanares
smelling of the Moors who lost their ethnological value to the history of brandy skin in
oceania melanin of the protist pigment sleeping sickness of a tsetse fly.

O Federico, a river of machines is humming and buzzing busy as bees buying their time
till they flood-fill the thimble of the God’s desires, the Gods will sew together the slender
bodies of pubescent boys playing and bathing in the suggestive lake of Whitman’s desires
out of the cradle endless rocking in the river that washes over their bodies tinted by a love
that dear not speak its name in the crowed fields of the sexual insane.

O Federico, O my Spanish lover of words kept in the breast pocket of Generacion del ’27
the Ultraist shall follow you pass the unmark grave where your statue is a cenotaph
erected by the guilt of the living who claim you in death.

O Federico, peaceful ruler of words like a fox you mapped the landscape of New York
with your bowtie around its neck and the Blacks welcomed you as if you were a long lost
child come home to the dead river running round the neck of the lynched flesh hanging
from a southern Cottonwood.

O Federico, O Garcia, O Lorca, O lover of boys, O Maricas you cut a fine figure of a
handsome man, your figure bounded by the beauty of words washing over the ages that
got lost in the everything river made by time, wet with rimes.

O Federico, like Whitman we are liken in ways beyond our art, beyond our habit to the
pen, our love of men, our singular want of the taunt flesh tight on the bones, we will not
study war no more but forever love, we will not praise the Gods of willing wars walking
the battle fields where youth is murder by the muzzle of a gun.

O Federico, my comrade, my hermano. Ay hermano! Ah, eres tứ that I follow into the
bars where words are sweating from the forehead and chest of the boys dancing shirtless
on the dance floor to the back beat of a fish simmering in sweat toward the sexual bump
and grin of their passion.

O Federico, the gays are at it again meeting in the drunk wooded parks they keep their
sexual desires zipped up till a stranger’s hand release their passion held in the loins they
suck the darkness of spoiled sons never to be born, fresh sperms are swimming pass the
tongue.

O Federico, I remember the time Ginsburg kissed me and I sucked the poems on the tip
of his generous lips, his genius was in being kind and concern for the heath of the world,
he was tender to the boys who stood naked before his aging flesh, they kept him young; a
sort of youthfulness that reside beside the wisdom earned by one living in their time.

O Federico, I remember walking along side Burroughs with his silent cane tapping on the
walkway of Colorado University toward a peyote trip swimming in my head, we were
silent but I heard the clouds speaking in the slow draw of Burroughs’ St. Louis voice
adding up the machines one by one the murderous clouds came alive with orange and
crimson rain and the crime of the day arched over the setting sun and the late August
moon looked down perplexed that two St. Louis writers could lose themselves in silent.

O Federico, Hell is at it again enticing man to do his worst, the rivers are at it again
draining the land of its worth, the boys are at it again gathering in the sexual darkness
where the secrets of the sexes plays out their desires. The sky is at it again weeping
weeping exquisite silent as if it was the blush of a young man. The machines are at it
again rotating their grinning noise to the whisper of clouds rubbing their backs together
like ire of ice sex of a heavenly order and the lost desires of boys who drop their pants
before the face of the government. The Blacks are at it again rapping the rape of words of
the sexual Gods caught in the headlight of MTV. The Whites are at it again pushing the
American way of submission to the highest order found in the purse of a dormant race
that bares the Black man’s body of an overly wisdom in the plays of my dear Federico..

Ode to Aimé Césair

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky
With stars in his eyes and the band-aid moon on his cheek. All the empires are calling; all
wish to overcome their defeat at the hand of time. There in Americus the black men are
kept in the closet close to the hangers where a lynched man swinging in the broken wind
is reading the Bible that has forgotten how to save him.

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky

With its pin point light lit by distant fire telling that there is life in the womb of night. In
Americus the children of the Buffalo are crying out but Americus can not hear then there
for she have stuffed her ears with dollar bills that bleed oil across the face of Washington
painted in a school on the San Carlos reservation and the Ute are united with the memory
of Chief Ouray and the Lenid meteor showers streak across the black man’s body bold
and biting at his nipples, bold and bitter by the blood that bleed its beautiful bounty born
by the Buffalo’s brother.

The body of a black man is stretched across the night where crime is committed in the
heated heart heard by the hard hour of a flower smelling of baby’s babble of mama and
dada, papa and the Hungarian’s tata, a tic for a tock runs the baby’s body clock ticking as
darkly of any black man’s skin. The baby will come to call himself nigger in a whisper
barely heard in the smell of cornbread baking in the freezer where we keep out memories
cool, where we want for not the weeping of a good man mending his mind mindfully
mining the Moor’s motion mapped and moped by militants marooned in the bloody battle
buying their time in the told tall tale of tongues taught to the young.

The body of a black man is stretched across the night that spreads from the heart of trees
dropping their spoils in spoonful to be eaten by the poor with pockets full of the butt ends
of commercialism kept in the warm handout of a caution consumerism recklessly
wounding the poor penny pinchers who pile their mounding miseries in a make ready
meant to met the mighty monster moaning its mouthful of maturation swollen and
swallowed sour and salty as the tears of a baby Baboon who believe in the battle born by
bones that bore the bribe used to build a body buried in the bitter bypass leading its
lonely lap around the legend that the lick of its last its long tongue was guilty of a gust
saying amen

The body of a black man is stretched across earth

Where the dealers of stars fluff the telling moon with its stolen light listless and capable
of a long lasting loneliness liquid by the last lane leading its facelift given by the 12 hour
night neat and nodding its knowable knowledge nipping at the hind end of a new cold
cloudy caravel wish with its cumbersome cruel chill that cure its stored craven caravan in
the hands and feet of the homeless whose hunger is hurried and hurled from the body into
the trash dumpster where their dinner is to be found full of the heat that hinge the horror
hard and high on the wounded hurt hidden behind the honesty of the hind legs of a
quarrel quickness of a quirky squirrel quick and quite as the quick cold carved into the air
christened by the bated breath of the son of a God that keep the cross as a safekeeping
hidden in the pocket of the wild wind whining with a whish wounded by words that woo
the worried woman who birth a boy born to bring blood to the scarified air.
The body of a black man is stretched across earth
Spinning without regret its regurgitate the umbilical cord of air weather blown over by
outrageous winds weeping the lost scent of Isis befriending the slaves who picks cotton
from her eyes. All matter of mischief break through when the Gods cry their prayers
sobbing like benedictions given in the wee hour of a satanic challenge, sobbing
inconsolable its blazes of flesh, sobbing a millennium of membranes, sobbing ‘who am I
to say” sobbing the tepidity of an indigent delirious lava that girdle the blue blooded body
born by a biting and bitter bully being itself while drinking from a bottle of blue baby’s
tears tossed and tinted to time told tall in the tradition of trepidation.

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt

Done over and under where the bodies of black children killed by their own rattle their
bones with an essential concentration that rush in the Mississippi night hawking its
hunger hard and heart felt as horny as flowers are for bees. The children are killing
children, are killing the killers, and are killing with bloody hand they go looking for the
great myth of their fathers. The children are playing war in the urban brain with its train
of tidal waves rushing pass the vices of their memories dropping like red bricks from an
abandoned building torn open by the weight of black birds.

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt

Where grows the joyous purple public in October opting out of the splendor of bread and
wine giving only on Sunday in the church of Yellow Pine weeping their shadows beneath
unforeseeable towns abrupt in their sleep of vague streets lined with shacks restored to
their fallen grander. Outside of Brooksville Mississippi, beside the grim of cutwater
throated birds the black plow is rusting for want of use, rusting a dirty red the blood
soaked hands of killing the meaty land in an exoticism’s pulse. The children are killing
themselves with the word nigger; slicing open their throats where fly from them flocks of
crows brilliantly bold blue black in their brutal black boundless blackness. I have seen
them building an industry of the musical muscles when the spiritual voice is vaguely on
the verge of voicing the void found in the wages of simple sin singled out to be sung
about.

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky,

It is tied down both hands and feet by Christianity less he escape into the obsessive rain
whose song is the very ecstasy of a mother God liquefied and dozing its surprises of
remembrance of man made treacheries committed against all but the sun’s force and the
cloth that it ware while Willows weep wantonly white and woozy willing to wrap their
warm bragging branches around the witness that leaving leaves make in the full fall of
the atoms of Autumn always over dress with it dropping of the dressing of all trees and
mums low to the girlishness of a grown season seasoned by the northern wind numbing
the knowable night nudging the near-by near-sighted needs napping in the never-land we
know the knee level legalist knowledge of dogs and guinea pigs, yes we are the art of
nature nudged on by a heart that beat beneath the bones that rib cave that share with
muddy mind moving motionless beneath the structure of skull once soften sounds alone
the smooth flow of salty season once sorely in need of a nip full of nightly dreams.

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky.

He is prostrated before the stagnant breath bitten by baboons and bisons, boa constrictors
and bobcats listening to the last bobtail tight and tugged in a tell- tale tongue fix for the
language of the young, when Europe have fallen into white despair that twist its screams
as white as virginal milk hatching their overrated pride then will a brighter day come, an
astonishing ambition of accumulated systematic confessing shadows of an authentic
announcing day will come to the brow beaten land. When the English cloth sleeps in the
vomit of the drunken streets full of exhaled fog falling forward fast and firmly, freely and
fondly, fluently as smoke from a thousand foundries then and then will a brighter day fall
full of the mercies showed to the slave by Elizabeth dying in her room on morphine,
Elizabeth who shall love us best after death. Why do I love thee, let me pray the way, let
my to my marooned memories move the mountains much an minuet caught in the
moment. The day has dawned dark and stormy stout with its rain that bloom in the higher
power of the death of the last sin of a goodly day found in the barely breathable beauty
buying its time with the angels sitting on the steps where my last lonesomeness has
forgotten how to smile at the telephone when it ring its rounds begging for attention.

The body of a black man is stretched across the night where negritude falls from his skin
to accused the whites of their aborted sins towering above the jazzy jimson turbulence
heard in the boredom drowning its scandals of offense of skin as sable as Cain’s, living
out their lives in the fundamental hypocrisy of a race done wrong. Do not weep. Be
strong in your Armstrong song. Be hard fisted. Be heard where you have planted your
pelvis. Let the children be full of soulful songs suing the strained long histories of being
with the whites with their wilted promises of 40 acres and a mule. In them; the gauntly
complicitous smiles of children; the guilty gusts of children, the empty spaces that they
can not keep will be filled with a horny history hiding its headstrong hornets of honor its
his story holding a hug that tell of time told by the rime where an empty child is waiting
to be filled with the holy curiosity of broken stones when the mountain convulse and
shred the clouds as it rush to the sea that suck at the sand to remake the beach in God’s
image
The sun is the secret stolen face of God that secretes its simple song of heat and light
without our buying by a penny. The wind is God’s face forced full of feathers falling
from foul figures who fluid their flight forward finding the rain ever willing to feed the
black man’s body born of a bold beliefs that he can build bodies upon bodies to reach the
heaven of his brother. Be my brother’s bitterly bony body born of his mother’s flesh, be
my bold brother that bully the bones of a burdensome belief in a God that built his home
in the heated heart harden and hurried, hung and haggard in its hunger for faith that is
flung full footed with foolish fortitude filed on the grinning wheel of the cross where is
hung the bloody body with nails rusting on the backside .

The body of a black man is stretched across the night, its grotesque fatherhood is the step
son of liberty caught between slavery and the crimes of the blood done in the egalitarian
rain running round the mulatto who scorched his skin under the justifiable sun abolishing
the rain once prosecuted by the Christian slave holders who supported the vanguards
leading the way toward racism taught to children running barefooted between trees of
condemned men, condemned by ready rope waiting patiently, by the cottonwood’s
strength tarred beaten by the white wind blowing the jaw bone of its prize of praise that
Hitler is saint of secret death published by bonny bodies.

The body of a black man in stretched across the earth, stymied by the iron-fisted absolute
human dignity of slaves’ work songs making their escape from the spiritual, songs as
poignant and yearning and smart as Brer Rabbit of the city park, the modern American
black man is Brer Rabbit incarnate to his American brothers, he is part Africans that flies
little by black birds calling massa with a yessuh, yessuh massa ringing down through the
extent of his cowardice that war the dices. I am such a man in my right knocked about
battled and bullied by bullets bone of my heroism fit to be lying down. The socket of my
question is simple, discolored and taxing the very roads of my nose, the lanes of my lips
where words play leads to the oldest human heart, the depth of my over exaggerated skin
with it prepensely for American poverty is born body bold with a Jackal’s justification.
The measure of the rhythm of my hair is well kept by the dread locks of Jamaica trees
home grown home hammed locks hangs light its new growth girlish it guard my brain
where the once insane notion of taking my life was published in the heart it died the death
of self worth and the toll line hold on of poetry that fought to keep me sane.

The body of a black man is stretched across the earth where rabbits tickling his
underbelly, the opossums climb up to ride along his back bone. The bats wing his hair.
Over his body the animals are working on Tiger’s farm and Leopard woman is chasing
Bush cows. The monkeys are tiding bobcat’s tail to the black man’s ankle. The yellow
dog is talking to Blackbird and Ringdove about the curse of the birds while Lion and
Jackal are saving the rain as Tortoise gives underrated praise. Hyenas are following the
elephant’s hips. Hare and Spider are off to visit Spider’s fiancée’s parents in heaven.
Squirrel is robbing Rabbit of his tail. Eagles and hawks are afraid of fowls. Brer Fox and
the Tar Baby play awful Mr. Wolf. The Pig is nosing the Baboon’s rear as King Buzzard
is spying down. On the body of the black man stretched is the gratitude of an ounce of
oozing air .

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt that is as dark as him, as crusted with
history, as a tongue tied into a knot, as stubborn as a child crying for its metamorphosis
mother, as carved up as an African mask’s enthusiasm, as bleached a dingy dark by night,
as right as the need for whiskey in need of a brown paper bag. Both man and dirt hunger
the worst that man can do and do again along the sixteen blocks roadway where piety
with its spat heretical petty splashing in a pool of conscienceless confederating is feeding
on the considerations pined against the wall of a fragile cannibalistic quarter.

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt where the savage death of freedom
comp an attitude against the miseries that is a mirage emphatic as being alone in the
hideousness of fire’s embrace, burning the collapsed mouthful of fraternal consumption
and contempt for the restless fallen hour that morn the conflagration of voices crying out
for a singular word birthed out of their ignore.
The body of a black man is stretched across the sky, his human fatigue docile against the
Ten Commandment given in a famished year to the ancient itching etching of the souls of
the chosen people who thirsted for the unopposed fireworks tormented by the benevolent
meant to heal wounds made when man was a child playing God by the fire of the sun that
burns the sea form relieving itself on the bleached beach by secrets of frenetic miners of
fishes in the water forest growing with generosities found in the mouth of a wayward
wave breaking its spectacle of collapsed brotherhood growing modest as morning also
breaking when the sun mounting the sky imprisoned by man’s body screaming its
convulsions there where the four windows corners of our world wisely will be folded into
a compost church where the birds worship their rhetoric rigged round riding the realms
ready for the rills, ready to reel in the ancestral dawn’s part of the soul sold sadly and
simply shyly to the church where the prodigious tadpoles voyage the sea.

The body of a black man is stretched across the night.

Who will tear the moon from his naval, who will eat his ripe prick, who will be his
prophet at large, who can hold him close around the neck of his missionaries insult, who
will and when wean themselves from his nipple and his fountain of tears when climate of
his season injury the confidence of his offense? Who is the priest of the pauper piled high
with pity and pride, pitted against the pets that paw at human forgiveness? Who can save
the poor pulling at his belly where a crumb hurt as a grain of sand turned into a pearl?
Who will save the souls of the hungry as sweet as homey honey, as honeyed eyed as the
child that sleeps in a box beside the heat vent of the street?

The body of a black man is stretched across the night and ten thousand tears shed in one
year are filled with minnows that whip their tails in the weight of the wee hour of a
hundred years. The electrified concrete and old steel of evil water have lost their
confidence in being an accomplice with hands that takes a turn at misleading the satanic
challenges that we make against the justice of force for the nostalgic yellowish wash of
the delirious sun.

The body of a black man is stretched across the earth of compulsion for the last anguish
he toss with trembling heart to the old lust of European overrated desires encircled with
blood smelling of tea and rum plowing the field where memories are planted to free the
history of pulse beating the beautiful egotism of a machine gun unappeased by the
obscene dignity precious and filled with accumulated madness.

The body of a black man is stretched across the earth, he laugh his thunder loud as a
proud glory, as a prince of wooden warriors carved by time, warriors that vomit in the
hold of a slave ship, warriors that enchant the forest, warriors of weariness found amid
the noble adventure recognized by the hard march of men looking to bring home the prize
found in their cowardice, warriors in the shape of black fathers marching away from their
sons who longs for a hard to hold, warriors of the masterpiece of pride untiring the
poverty found in the uninhibited industrious cities hiding the defense of machines in the
fruit on the tree that droop heavily heavenly with pedantic tears, warriors victoriously
wounded by the warriors of slavery fighting in Peru, warriors of Chem at Nowe, at
Memphis of old, of old Thinis, warriors of Khufu and Cushites, warriors of the Libyans,
the Ethiopians, the Nubian and the Thebans, warriors of the talking drums heard when the
Spider that outwitted the rich woman, heard for Mwiundo the little one just born, he
walk the baby rivers running, he dance round about the darkness of his skin.
He who went to sleep wake up

You have no power against Mwindo,

Mwindo is the little one born he walked.
He who went to sleep wake up.
Look, I am playing with my conga scepter.
Though Muisa slay Mwindo
And I shall die,
Muisa, you are really helpless against Mwindo,
Against Mwindo, the little one just born he walk

The little one just born he walk toward the city of a hundred gates when black Egypt
turned brown and white, when the mulattos came, when the blacks were scattered in a
force migration when the whites came, when the blacks was chained with the bloody
irons smelling of their names, the chains forged by the hands of slaves to enslave their
brothers. The little one just born he wakes, he walk, he wink at going astray, he weep and
wish out a wheeze of praises. The little one just born he walks the city of the common
grave when the Christens came to change our names.

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt and ancestral Christianized tom-toms
growing from his skin were cries of treason against the fate of Christianity wilted in the
light of nature as the one true God. The lotus eaters are gathering in the lake to be
baptized by the bats beating their wings back against the black skin of a sudden pride
caught in the order of hands luminous and extremely humble by the thumb that poke
itself in the eye of the sun when the bird of pray circle the disorder of the flesh breaking
down deep and done drawn and quarter by the whip in the town square fatigued from
seeing so much murder done in the name of a God that darken his skin in a desert walk,
wandering through the cathedral of sand his aim was to save man but mindful man
resisted the salvation of his spirit for the appetites of his flesh in a fat year where the fat
of an apple is picked from the tree of carnal knowledge and the fat of the criminal tree
Is burning back its bark by the bail bondman’s bounty booming its bulky bullwhip by the
bee’s building honey combs better then man made.

The body of a black man is stretched across the dirt, he illuminates the hummingbird’s
wings beating back the strong winds that beam the gentle alcoholic quicklime of
luminous deafness of a heard germination of femininity, he illuminate the exultation of
reincarnated joy of a beautiful prophesy in the form of a beautiful boy spoken for in the
temperament of a figurehead unique to the germination of a tyrannical universal hunger
that thirst for the drunken blemishes found in the promiscuity humble and yet callused in
the muscles that brace the horizon weeping under water. He illuminates the locomotive
secret of sorcerers that break the wounds of water flowing it’s deform currents of thirst.
He illuminates the trade winds blowing its speech of reasons gaping it’s proclaim
strength apocalyptic as a tornado of volcanoes gigantic with blisters. He illuminates the
negritude found in a baby’s fist. He illuminates the business end of earth by parasites. He
illuminates every star, omnipotent but injured by an enormous bone bloated and bound by
pestilence. He illuminates the fat of his liver trapezoidal as a second class citizen draping
themselves with an unexpected respect for control. He illuminates the white God that tells
us to be good niggers to accept our servitude without complaint, to bare our burden as
fresh milk midst the udders of a cow holy in the streets of India.

The body of a black man is stretched across the sky he is held captivated by the
conquering fire of the sun and the invented motion of the moon. He is breathing a bathe
for the entire world. He is reconciled by the exultation of his survival. He is the
resentment of meditation on the uniqueness of his sable race rocked by slavery and the
religion of fornication that seeks to preserve the tyrannical nation of the chyrch of his
intermittencies imposed by a God stolen from his master who taught the Bible with a
whip to make the calluses of his laboring hands humble and for free hire by the holy
words. He is stretched over the veinlets of trees and the veins of rivers forever running
wild till man temporarily take away their force but there is always something wild about
the hinged river that overflows its banks and floods the land; something willing to pass
on the grim of the mercenary water in the conflagration of spring. The ancestors are
gathering to free us from our orders issued by our suppressors, and the warriors who have
done the flesh of their lives by the dirt; the joyful jolly of warriors is all that was not
taken from us. The indigent throat of warriors drifts its compulsion of membranes like the
last train leaving history behind and their whisper of words wave across the great water
washing away the girdle gusty guilt of the wind that confess its confusion invented by the
flamboyant roll call of dead name. When the ancestors come calling us to command the
fatherhood of our forgettable distant with its counter-thrusts pushed and pulled by a
startled bird with its shoulder to the griming wheel then we will come to know their lost
fathers.
 Ode to Beauty

O beauty, beauty the great boundaries of your cutting blaze is the throat that preach the
holy way known to the souls lost in the armpit of a shriveled city where what remain of
the overgrown growth hoping to gain a foothold is the resistance of the concrete to
mother the motion of grass. Beauty you are my Venus of ashes, my cold sealing wax of
new graves dug in the palm of my hand. Beauty you are the seawater breathing hundreds
of tongues full of tears that rush upon the breach of my thighs. You are a mountain of
heavenly lies ancient as finding yourself struggling encased in a plastic drop. You empty
the sky. You are the sleepless skeleton that we pray by, lay by, and in vain wait by.

O beauty, beauty shall I kiss your hair that hides the summer birds, your cheeks flush
with worm’s blood grounded in a gorge grinning its grain gorgeously by the geese’s
cries. Shall I keep you safe in my breast pocket of tenderness taught to the young who
keep their youth tight between the shoreline of their fingernails? My pockets are filled
with gravity, yours with the rose’s thorn fix for making torn love’s fluency bleed with the
blood of angels who worship at the chemist’s shoulders.

O beauty, beauty forever defying the whispering motion of who you shall call to task,
you are my hands I take them from you, you are my legs mad with your strength, you are
my eyes eating the quite, low mourning of an exquisite cry, you are my melancholy
telegram issued by the governor of cold fishes, none is your equal for everything is
caught in the tail wind of your pulverized breath. O beauty, O moon the same, O sun that
drain away beauty’s face from the terrify cover of everything caught within your middle
age grace where the rivers runs like deserted streets sweep by a wind lost in the corroder
of landscape of the city.

O beauty, beauty when will you be washed away, when will you cub your waves, when
will you taste the equilibrium of gunpowder used as your shade against the musical
muscles of the brave? When will you remember the wreckage of eyeglasses and the
millions of pigeons that people the accommodated sky? When will you free us from the
machines delirious by your perfume, fragile by a blue perspective that sleeps in a
circumcision?

O beauty, beauty you are the tambourine of my memory, you are the bare back black boy
that builds industry nursing at the breast of the Mississippi ignorant of St. Louis. Few are
your column of comrades, few who will weep at the gasoline of your feet, you are the
first fire fruit eaten, and you are the nudity of a Sycamore leaf falling at the crack of dust
dawning; the split opening in night hiding under cars. No one will avoid you. Many seeks
to repeat your delight, yes many; the given boy and the gave to girl that plays at
prostitution, even your enemies with the sleeplessness of their hurtful poison are sons and
daughters of your bitter beauty born in the belly of a burned beast roasting its nude pillow
beside the bride of breeze in branches.

O beauty, beauty you are the squirrel in the talons of a California golden eagle made of
tin and sealing wax and bubble glum in the shape of a storm cloud. You are the epochal
of April’s rain strung across the yawning sky that question why the over exaggerated
pelvis of cowardice poverty can not placate the unknown bellies burning with hunger.
You are the invincible innocent of the compassionated tornado that hiccup in a drop of
rain fallen into a puddle holding the beautiful essence of parasites as bandits. O beauty,
beauty I watch you perishing in the rot of fruits on the kitchen counter and I violently
laugh a fugitive laughter that take full flight across the stagnant antique rhythm of the
poison of my passion for poetry. O russet beauty naked in the womb of the appalling
assassin dreaming obscene promises of wild infants who shall come to murder the speed
of tomorrow with a broken silence.

O beauty, beauty many hunger for the Negro dawn with its transparency opened all night
quivering beneath the volcano of litigation. You are an eruption in my blood; you are the
swagger that contemplates the consistency of a sinister fish’s immaculate virgin. You are
the map of my history carved into my skin. You are the constellation of my aroused
savage yet tender tendencies toward loyal.

O beauty, beauty blank in the face of sortilege you can not be untaught by mosquitoes
feasting on the migration of poems that thrills the baby’s ear. You are unbreakable as the
madness of wild rivers full of deep throated thunder. O beauty you are precious as pure
rumors running aground to seduce all jaded rituals. You can not be extinguished by the
ringmaster who craves the kinky stumble of a tough rejection race. You are never guttural
in your silent prostitution.

O beauty, beauty, solitary in the public squares where classical pagan pigeon outwit man
with their inscription writ in feather. O beauty you are the museum of mirrors where-in is
seen the unforgettable statues of intimate tree trunks and your timeless blushing beauty
that burse the brute who buried you in the muzzle of a gun. Awake O beauty with your
genuine antiquity of tongues, awake my dark haired lover of the enormous weight of
water. Awake you furiously abandoned science of ignorant. Awake you rusty secret held
in the blood of poets that cry your suggestive wisdom, your voice is caught in the
equilibrium that probes the motion of a child on the run.

O beauty, beauty we cry out to you as a wounded leaf to the wind, you are the murmuring
landscape of our target, you who were murdered by the astonishment of nocturnal desires
held in the knife hand of a fluid compliant against the Gods who have abandon all the
little animals within your arms. You are the evident of your epidemic. You are the
ecstatic insistency that hesitate and tremble your strangle suffering of the heart that
harvest a profusion of miracles held in a pleasing face, the non-evasive face utterly
beautiful as to ensnare the criminal from his extraordinary deeds done down by the
disheveled docks doped by trash. O beauty, beauty stripped of the anger of forgotten
things, beauty delicious as atmosphere and flamboyant as the free odor of the triumphant
sexual desires, cavernous and corrosive that commands thee.

O beauty, beauty you are the beast of burden that bear the weight of the world
Sold in the market place where all is for sale beneath the shadow of the dollar and your
narrow feature white with commercial and the commerce of your straight haired beauty is
as thin as the Africa rain in a lean year. You are my silent sedentary sister, you are the
bold black muscles of my brother used to bully by bullets that bash a dark flesh. You are
the sad complaint issued in the market place where beauty cheat the Gods of their
blessing and gives in return a soiled kiss meant to betray the God that hung on a dead tree
and there-by deliver the sins of his silent death for the lost face of beauty caught in the
face of a mother who can not understand that there is beauty in the death of her son. I find
you on the murderous northern streets of St. Louis where the body of a boy lies stuffed in
the corner of a beautiful darkness filled with silent that bleed the last whisper that bed
down in the beauty of your self.

O beauty, beauty bare in the streets of a stale wind that blows your bounty between the
border of the birth of a baby baboon and the bully forest where life is full of the id and
the doom living inside of the skin of trees hungry for the air of human breath. Beauty you
are the last poem never written in the rush toward the sea where you take your rest. I have
seen you in the faces of the faces that care not to concern themselves that you grace them
in the hips of a woman, I have seen you in the muscles of men whom comb their hair
with a twig when the musk of a days work hang from your breath and the honesty of their
labor is as beautiful as the beauty that I can bare to take in a time where you are for sale
in the market place.

O beauty, beauty, O my darling, O my dear you are as poetry to the ear.

You have made up my mind about the nature of the divine and I will breath your rime as
the winds that whisper its discontent in the trees, as the riot’s ribbon of rain that drown a
worm, as the speckle of snow falling in the head light of the lonely lonesomness caught
in the motion that moves the weight of the world. You are the eye of a butterfly focused
of a loaf of bread; you are the overfed sense of a flower. Beauty. you are the art of dying
and the birth that is born of you will last forever, forever your name torrential where the
streets crumble, their wounds swollen as black bellies in Africa.

O beauty, beauty my eyes have committed no crimes, the currency of my heart will not
challenge you, the luxurious weapons of my body; yes the criminal continents of my legs
are tamed by the anxieties that you offer me and I commit no nocturnal treason against
you. Beauty, I present myself as ebony spokesman at your door of destiny drunk on the
beautiful face of a boy. Suddenly my fingers count the serious relationship between
accursed revolution and legitimate liberation both caught in your face.
The Inner Mind
The Rebellious Mind
The Seeing Mind
The Black Mind
The Pondering Mind
Face #16
Face #25
Use for cover

having read I ask again can I be your poet