P.

 

 

 

   I, as you, like poems that don't require a lot of liquid.Whose lines can be counted with the fingers of the dead giants hand. Poems whose manes can be saddled and rode into dusty Mississippi towns, after the massacre of course, with flags waving and manifest. Poems of myrrh, myself and James Brown sliding our iron taps over floors polished by the messages of slaves who merely pined for shiny leaves. Huh? Poems that unlock young black boys from the world of baggy pants and allow their ineffable souls freedom to burn unbothered and  embraceable. I can still remember my first poem. Proud, but unlike with a sac of coins, I pushed it into the crawlspace with the mutine rat and his assortment of cutoff goose heads and pee. My wish was to parade it around and hold it high like a banner of decorum, a declaration of my desire for change but tomorrow came and came again and kept coming, with its absolue construction and although my plots got lost, I still hobbled around like a man with long, long arms but stumps for legs."God Save the Queen", and Uncle Henry snaps to attention, one of his legs 92 the other 87 and recalling a war he says he remembers fondly, even though he had to live in separate quarters, clean toilets and yell "YASSAH CAPTIN" until the potatoes were ready.Old men should only write poems if their hands shape knots or the piney woods they come from can cut out a truth like a cane sickle can, or show us the mercy of darken dusk flung against the squall.

Reviews

[Frank]

Its easy to be brave now that segregation is won for freedom. I was always on the white side when I saw segregation I hated what our side did and yet was part of it. We don't know how they managed to live, the brave died young and hungry. The slippery one said yasah cos of their children, their sweet cariads who slept while the sucked up to the baas.
In the depression of the '30's factories in London had large notices that said:

No Irish, No Welsh...and they thinking they were free had walked hundred of miles to ask for a job.

Let the old man write his poem of endurance, we are here because of them.

[Emily B]

hell, yeah! i came again and read just as if the words were brand new, that must mean these are pretty tall words

[Emily B]

when our words meet metal we can change the world - I think Angelo must have meant words like these