I’m not trying to resist.
I don’t mess with that no more.
This is when you add a knuckle game to the triple feature.
Teddy-Up bounces Angel off an old movie poster.
The star’s front tooth is blacked out.
A dialogue bubble reads, I’m better off dead.
Horns were scratched onto Cinderella’s
pigtails, purple moons colored her eyes.
Angel looked like a Taíno Valentino with
a Young Lord Afro, six-packed to his core,
a study of hearts that never pumped Kool-Aid.
Not for nothing, honestly & truthfully,
you would later say,
That shit was like a movie.
YOU LOSE SOMETHING EVERY DAY
You Lose Something Every Day
It was Dre who once said,
You lose something every day
Your mind on the way to the store
The floor on the way to your mind
Your mind on your way to the clinic
The clinic on the way to one more
The mad in the way of your kind
The lyrics to your favorite song
The cure on the way to the camp
The finish on your way to the line
Your nickel in the way of a dime
The short to your favorite long
The loss on the way to the find
The skin that was yours to bare
The crown that was yours to wear
The floor you were forced to clean
The game that was yours to fair
The face you were pushed to mean
It was Dre who once said,
You lose something every day
Revival
Another Saturday night revival down the Block, and a pulpit full of Born Agains two-step past the chicken slaughterhouse.
Full moon and we still couldn’t see each other, still couldn’t reach that upper air. In the same breath, we discovered that you can’t be Jesus’s son when you’re in front of a gun.
Pamphlets & speakers circulated the word,
& saving us was never on the court’s docket.
O crackling tombstones.
Devil, the Sister sang, don’t get dressed because you ain’t invited.
Dre spit to the tambourine:
I get baptized in the sunrise /
Got realized in the wise & whys.
The Reverend spit too:
Cleanse the street off you, son.
Stop your life lie.
Come and brave this damn nation.
Do or die, as you say.
Who was it on lookout that yelled from the rooftop,
Dre, who you trying to be, bro?
How to describe that sound when the birds flutter like a deck of cards being shuffled? Where to find your uplift & hallelujah, hosanna & hero, campana & chorus?
Dre plopped to his knees and cried, It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.
A crown of circus tents, two-headed spotlights, steady go tell it on a mountain, & still no Glory for the crew.
Surround systems & cement trucks parked by No Parking. Trust & believe, there was enough mix to bury all of us.
Where Did We Find the Laughter?
How to measure the end of summer before policy & polls, before seen, saw & said something, before lie, law & lost something.
All the lyrical legislators slipped a smart
bomb into our drinks; our cuts & tracks
were found facedown in a vault filled to
the brim with standing-room-only facts.
Give us a bag of wet, mark us in a soft spotlight, provide a laugh track, and there still wouldn’t be anything funny, so let’s frame Saturday night with Dre once again.
Syrup on his whiting Dre
Honey on his tuna Dre
Black Ethiopian Jew Dre
DeWitt Clinton High School Dre
Angel-dusted, naked, dick swinging in defiance of a heat wave Dre
Augusta Savage bronze in a 100-yard dash down Lexington Avenue, spirit chasing like whoa, & from our beach chairs all we could do was point and say, Oh shit, that’s Dre.
There were some of us sitting there who could tell when Dre was punched or slapped by the way the walls in our building Richter-scaled.
Who was it that saw him jackknife out the sixth-floor window? His white yarmulke gyrated like a dizzy UFO, and what remained of Dre but his anchor & fishnet chain dangling off the sliding board?
You once asked, Yo, where do we come from? Like, really come from? Like, from where? Like, where does that bomb-diggy-dang need to sing our corners come from?
Brother Lo used to say, It’s been scientifically proven that a negus can put the universe in a headlock.
Check the way we laugh now when we think of Dre, as if to say,
Shit ain’t funny, man.
THE POETRY COPS
PAPO: Dre smoked a bag that was too wet. I told you already, I don’t know who bodied Nestor, and it wasn’t Dre, if that’s what you’re getting at.
COPS: A wet bag?
PAPO: Purple Rain. Crazy Eddie. Zoo Bang.
COPS: Did someone throw him off the rooftop?
PAPO: It would’ve been better that way, but Dre threw Dre off the rooftop.
COPS: But how to know if no one saw?
PAPO: The whole Block saw.
COPS: What else did you see?
PAPO: I already told you what I didn’t see.
COPS: Nestor, Petey on Friday. Dre on Saturday. That’s a lot of bodies.
PAPO: That was a jackpot, a weekend trifecta, a straight number hit.
COPS: Did Dre ever say anything about suicide?
PAPO: Nigga couldn’t kill himself right, man.
Freshly Dipped
That night Dre visits in a dream.
Freshly dipped,
24-karat name bracelet &
a halo on his pinky.
We had been sworn to silence and Rakim spoke for the crew when he said, I ain’t no joke.
C’mon, Dre says, it’s about to rain that Puerto Rico rain.
Nestor’s there too. He says, This block is my island. Then he did his best Slick Rick imitation and sang, “All alone, no one to be with.”
Petey calculates bundle percentages near a bread loaf.
The icebox in front of Gaddafi’s whirls into a tombstone, and you hear a voice that you heard before, a voice that says, Ain’t nothing happening.
Skin & bone flip to dust & ash.
Your vapor oozes out of the icebox with a report from St. Raymond’s Cemetery: Charlie from the group home is still pitching chronic, T-Lai-Rock has designs on making a comeback to the Land of the Living, and Dwight said he got one more nut in him.
Héctor Lavoe & Billie Holiday sing a duet.
Ask the dead, they know life, says Brother Lo.
And before Dre leaps into the icebox, he says, Yo, you know how they say that the soul leaves the body when you die? Wait till you see what part of the body it exits from, bro.
And, boom, he was ghost.
Each One Teach One
&
what dribbled out when the Block
coughed at the end of the night?
A Superman action figure
Purple 5 food stamps
Golden Glove wannabes
Mighty Mouse cheese lines
A Dapper Dan Gucci watch
A ticket to the Celebrity Club
A bevy of Yamahas throttling down 7th
A dope MC at the Rooftop
A Woo Hah trope & a Skate Key stopper
Claw’s cankered forearm
Mikey’s pigeon coup
Abuelita’s chicken soup
The parade float
The honey on the float
The honey right off the boat
Straight sentences
No pleas
A rat cheesin’ in the garbage
A sunset surfing the Harlem Line
Tenant patrol flyers
A silent accomplice
A firefly in the jar
A pair of faded jeans
A portrait in lattice
Co-opted ciphers
An old Life magazine
A preacher’s splintered head
Two rusty badges
A cluster of pill bottles
A combination lock
A corroded Sugar Hill LP
A drive-by greeting card
A message with gears
A primal scream
A gangster’s last wish,
Unpaid bills &
A beatbox—
Like Each One Teach One Ethiop used to say,
Those ain’t bodies washing up on the street. Those are receipts.
FORGET WHAT YOU SAW
Forget What You Saw
I.
You want to see.
You’re in the whip, looking.
You want to be seen as you see.
You want to be seen,
and having been seen,
never seen again.
There’s hurt in your eye; it’s been there since
the Dutch set up shop.
You ain’t running from nothing,
but you ain’t chasing nothing either.
Looking. As in,
the best way to watch was the
other way.
To see before they could say, I saw.
You lean to the side & recline, only to see
Who else is hurting.
This is how you decide to gaze these days.
II.
Who
This, That & the Third,
always looking for something.
Light most definitely, black. Bite the
sky off it, man.
Bring some, they said,
you talkin’ so much.
The shook ones always live in
running starts.
What Block was that again?
Who was that you said again?
Who you again?
Those tales
lie best on nights like these—
Who tried to at least.
Fly, shoot—
Please, shhhhh.
III.
Yours go bling Black,
Black uh Black uh brain
split &
spilling,
spilling,
& spilling.
Your oral history, a constant balm
for the first walk-in & last testament.
Hunger, all teeth,
no showtime to eat,
apart from money
what did we spend &
send all the green back.
The starting line ends here,
in the Land of Ballers &
Shot Callers, the Land of
Cuban links & chocofan.
Sink as far bottom as you can, you decide.
But why always why always always
why
always everything everything got to be
about love, just wondering god—
it’s true, you could be a lot of things given
everything that’s out
there.
IV.
Forget what you saw
people Who
Know this for sure
are very suspicious
of this Nothing.
This is a stickup.
Don’t make it a
Bonnie.
Blood is always looking for
a subject, a little something
about the Beginning before
it starts, the attempts
to find
yourself at off-peak hours; no
images would be perfect for
this chill in the cut. Swear to God &
Kaboom—
Bodies fall faster than
stock prices, seen more
than the time it takes
to forget.
The thing is, though, not to
stay behind &
take the Life
that was taken
from you.
FORGET WHAT YOU HEARD
THE POETRY COPS
PAPO: You have to forget what you heard, even if you were out there when it happened.
COPS: But how to stay true to what you see?
PAPO: I wrote what I saw in the face of what I remember.
COPS: Well, who is the you?
PAPO: The you is you. Us, we, all of them, and the others. That’s you.
COPS: Let’s continue.
PAPO: That’s all. I’m just trying to build.
COPS: Let’s talk about Voice.
PAPO: Okay. Voice. On any Saturday night you could find yourself running against your voice. The voice that yells Five-O Teddy-Up is about to jump. That voice that suggests you don’t go down a certain block, that you stay away from that blond streak, that you go home early, that at any moment your screams can go dry.
COPS: What happens when Voice comes to stay?
PAPO: Like Baraka used to say, I can see something in the way of ourselves.
COPS: That sounds like Brother Lo.
PAPO: You don’t know patience until you stand on the corner when shit is slow. Brother Lo was on some planet rock shit. He made sure that we enlisted in the fight for freedom—not now, but right now.
Forget What You Heard
Heard you tried to win her back
Heard the new stamp was wack
Heard you was mad at your girl
Heard you was mad at the world
Heard your girl was fucking your boy
Heard your girl was fucking your toy
Heard you were smoking woos again
Heard you were breaking rules again
Heard you stopped going to the club
Heard you found where lies the rub
Heard there was poison in your cake
Heard there was honor at high stake
Heard the screw was trapped in a lug
Heard the crew was set up with a bug
Heard you never gave up the sugar
Heard you still picking your boogers
Heard the kings were high in the rubble
Heard the beginning was always trouble
Brother Lo on the Prison Industrial Complex
Brother Lo was a story master, a library without a card, a cuento king who could drop fables about the Young Lords, the spiritual value of Japanese swords, the degree of separation between concrete & rain, ice cream & pain.
He once said, One hand can’t wash the other if you’re busy counting with your fingers.
He also said, The law is one top spin after another and bankrolls beget death tolls.
This was before the two baddest buildings in the city were knocked out with a fuel-injected Guernica, before the urban planners had a jones for busting libraries.
The so-called bar starts early, says Brother Lo.
Starts with a permission slip for a class trip to the local precinct.
Starts with If you see something, you better not say shit.
Your teacher will urge you to get excited.
Free mug shots if you behave.
You’re going to get arrested like it was for real:
che
ese sandwiches, sour milk, dented oranges
& a hint of ammonia in your cough.
There will even be a contest to see how long you can stay handcuffed to a classmate before you decide to throw him under the bus.
Before you leave the school, your teacher will ask you to line up for a head count.
It should be fun, your teacher will say.
Trip day comes and you see your first chain gang, a head speed-bumped into a desktop, a door creaking to a close on a confession.
The bus ride home will be less park than amusement.
The sirens will sound petrified, but happy.
Your mother doesn’t believe in conspiracies, so she’s good with it.
Your father was a revolutionary before he sold the revolution for two bundles & a quarter water.
When it’s time to show & tell, the only thing you can remember is standing on line, waiting for copies of your free mug shots, and right before you left the precinct, you heard the desk sergeant taking odds that half the class will come back arrested for real.
The Whole World on a Subway
According to Brother Lo, you will go to court and find the whole world on the subway.
Coffee cup lids will spit impatient steams and a blind man with two good legs will say, This don’t look like what it seems.
You will see a brother named Lucky, and as soon as he sees you he will start talking open cases, rehab, programs, offers, pleas & deals.
You will look for something that can hold the weight, and come upon a poem, a subway poem, a poem in transit, a poem about planks & experience—twice.
By the time you reach 96th Street, you’ll detect a heartbroken voice yell, Damn, why don’t you fucking say excuse me!
A brother named Jose (it will say Jose on his Lenox Hill Hospital Dickie) will tap out a happy hour blues with his rolled-up Daily News. You will learn the beat by heart and scat it from Reception to Reentry.
At 59th Street, a walking confectionary will almost go to hell with a sweet tooth for stepping on Lucky’s high-top shell tops, and Lucky will have just finished saying that he’s been looking for an excuse to lose it.