fadfargrg

Bojangles(A Forlorn Caricature)

 

Somewhere deep in the margins....

deep in the margins....

 

It strikes me as peculiar,

the way the blacks,

as if genetically predisposed,

gravitate toward the back

of the bus.

and how on that very same bus,

i sit beside a poor black schizophrenic bum

reading the newspaper upside down aloud

and i can hear his stomach's desperate growls

and across from me

pampered white girls discuss

their menial superficialities.

 

And the way my parents blindly appraise

Yaweh the Anglo Saxon

In one of those fine historically

black churches

where at the epicenter of the altar

they pay reverence to the

twenty foot tall image

of the blessed good white

patriarchal lord Jesus Christ.

(The grand irony of it all being

that their church is in

Pittsburgh's Hill district;

"Hill" the operative pseudonym

for n****r)

 

And how academia 

has me Claude Neal'd

hung and asphyxiated

on a noose of Euro centrism

mended with narcissist fibers.

a curriculum of self-hatred

Forlorn feet of cold 

black-red leather dangling.

An epidermis likened to

emaciated silk

Emasculated of my Africana

an amalgam of man's filth.

 

Somewhere deep in the margins....

deep in the margins...

 

Ragged Dream

 

“It is in our national interest to give the Horatio Alger Myth a rest, for it broadcasts a fourth

Message no less false than the first three-that we live in a land of unlimited potential.

Although that belief may have served us well in the past, we live today in an era of diminished possibilities.”

-Harlon L. Dalton

 

It is fed to us while we incubate

post umbilical cord, pre-pubescent discord

injected into our new born veins

intravenous therapy carries

a deoxygenated dream.

cataracting despotism down the bloodstream

cascading its sovereignty over

our arteries, arterioles and capillaries

ambivalent liquids flood our callow organs.

a systemic infiltration of our systemic circulation

lost and then returned to the heart deplete

pulmonary circuits channeling emptied

blood vessels of reddened misconception

delicate vertebrates articulating in vain

an upright fallacy of veritas

running from the atlas down to the coccyx

rendering them feeble, deluding us fragile bipeds

it seizes the cerebral cortex by its spongy tissues

softens them down to a fine slush of sophism

then proceeds to blind the occipital lobe,

before it renders the frontal lobe delusive

blood eternally coagulated

in a hue of cognitive dissonance.

 

Cleansing

 

Bathe ostentatiously

making sure to wash

the unkempt n****r out.

Institutionalize behind

the ears assimilate

to the suds

scrub the lingering

chicken grease.

Rub-a-dub-dub.

 

Southern Fried

 

Southern fried prophet

Jim Crowe law God.

She served hot plates of sweet potato soul 

and barbecued blues

fatigued Negro hands cooked 

self evident truths in the kitchen

emancipation salted and brewed over the stove.

salvation was served for dinner:  

corn bread, mashed potatoes,  deep fried chicken, pork chops, 

collard greens, canned yams, chitlins, and macaroni and cheese.

she said it was the best damn meal 

below the Mason Dixon

and she had the grease stains

to prove it

her eldest son would rush to the kitchen

to grab his plate

making sure to blow on it to let it simmer

and he hated the bones

and he'd tell her "One day Momma, you gon' have me chokin' 

on one of these big ol' bones".

and she'd say

"better that, than lynched"

 

Base Desires

 

I awoke to a dried mouth

and eviscerated dreams from the minds bowels.

As I came to, the holy ghost of auto-eroticism compelled

me to masturbate; this went on for roughly fifteen minutes.

Afterward I bathed my carcass under the shower

head struggling to find sanity in sanitation

the water washed away the dead layers of sin

as vestiges of the unconscious mind poured down the drain.

 

Prone to mortality I began to brush my teeth,

pearly Anglo-Saxons in a Negro’s mouth.

I convinced the incisors that racism was a

convention of the past, implored my molars

to embrace the multicultural bristles.

 

As I began to floss my gums started to bleed.

 

Then I promptly left the house.

My languid feet hovered over the

empyrean tombstone of the sidewalk,

that longitudinal gray that houses

the bones of dead native America.

 

I scrolled my I pod for a fitting tune,

briefly contemplaying the Brandenburg Concertos

before my ears concluded the platonic ideal

to be “Express Yourself” by

Niggaz Wit Attitude.

 

At the bus stop I found myself

surrounded by varying degrees of flesh.

Trust fund xenophobes intersecting parasitic hobos.

I wondered how much cleanser bourgeois

A******s were than proletarian ones.

 

And then the bus arrived.

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[L.Edward]

Powerful stuff. I dig the sombre realism of this suite. Quite earthy.