If my mother were ever convicted for her addiction
like my father, I wonder who I would be robbing now.
The data from the Fragile Families studies
say my kind of survival displays more behavioral problems
and early juvenile delinquency.
I say, you right.
I rode into the night with a pistol in my gray hoodie,
spitting image of my father.
His nickname akin to bone.
His red skin the only thing I remember him towering over me.
Black hair, red bloodshot eyes already running, already gone.
This was the closest time I ever came
to becoming a woman with a number for a name.
It is easier than you think to lose yourself
in search of resemblance.
Politicians with expensive silk ties
cut taxes, pad pockets, sterilized would-be mothers,
charge their district with the bill.
Cue reality TV series suggest art programs
to settle the inmates and wonder why
humans climb the walls trying to escape
their own skin after the teaching artist is asked
to stop bringing in poems that encourage collective behavior.
A father gives you his hands.
Two, your mother laughs with the breath of a ghost.
C, no one remembers how much you cried.
Five, there are more houses in your throat than one can count.
E, you forgot how to count because you
forget how to say I love you.
Eight, your grandmother is a steeple.
Nine, you love how love sounds more than how it works.
10, you love how love works more than how to hold the pieces.
11, your father showed you how love
works with his absent mouth.
J, I love you.
K, your grandmother is a steeple.
You are only a cemetery meandering.
14, you can bury anything inside these hands.
14.5, your best with the dirt.
15, you wear a printed t-shirt to the local farmers market.
The black letters read: do not get lost here.
There is nothing but white soot.
Marathon runs of Wentworth mist the room like smoke clouds.
And I know TV is only TV to someone that
had never been forced to look outside their own heartbreak
before.
I binge-watched the Australian television drama.
After a several week streaming stint,
I find myself crying, crying, crying
for the world which held my father, and uncles,
and brother, and cousins like a fist.
What's a cliff dive to a Black man hustled by his own country?
He earns $0.92 an hour and my tuition still ain't free.
The woman behind the financial aid counter
asked me what my father makes.
I say furniture for the dorms here.
I say, grandfatherless children.
I say, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know who he is.
No one prays for their babies.
I entered the gates of a boys' prison
menacing the border of Bristol, England.
The smell that refuses to leave my jean jacket three days later
must resemble the air of Pelican Bay.
I tossed the jacket in the trash, privilege
with the ability to push away the dilemma
of a nation-induced disorder.
Nation induced disorder was the original name of this poem
until I realized it is a worldwide condition fueled
by capitalism.
This global epidemic is rampant in Thailand, Australia, Mexico,
Honduras, Brazil, Papua, New Guinea, Ukraine, and Belize.
This must be the scent of apathy.
And still this is the closest I'll ever
come to visiting my father.
I remember death.
Yesterday, Nipsey Hussle was mowed down
in front of his clothing store on Slauson and Crenshaw.
The world raged, a forest of dying
like a glaring of fangs brimming into neighboring fur,
or a gang of buffalo broadside beneath the Compton skyline,
or a parade of elephant eulogies moving in silence,
or a cauldron of bats darkening every street
to match the ardere of a people.
Our young, a rump of otter-uttered blessings facing
the bleak-faced crash as an ambush of tigers
scowl at their audacity.
The babies wail for justice, their
screams full of drift and red blues.
This is how we grieve: candles, and teddy bears,
and flowers, and posters, tear and prayer hands,
and wailing, and wailing, fighting and swinging,
and singing, and singing for the flawed men
that search for redemption, for the men that remind us of home.
Just minutes away in Inglewood, California,
my uncle pulls his blue plastic folding chair
under the nearest shaded tree in the communal yard
to watch the passersby.
My uncle's youngest brother has been dead for years.
He sits outside, anyway.
I wonder if he can still smell the See's Candy factory
two blocks away.
Does he remember how sweet and satisfying a taste
after we pooled our mangled silver together for lollipops?
Does he still wait for my gone uncle to visit?
Is that what he's risking under the sun?
I remember.
So if I can write, I do.
If I can write, I do.
Today when the sky is forgiving enough,
and the smog pretends itself an heirloom of history,
I am sky dumb, cloud sick until still.
There, in the corner of my smile is
a poem waiting to be picked up, dusted off,
and shined real good.
But all I can muster is the strength
to pull myself to the bathroom mirror
and try to relocate my father's rage.
Instead, I find you, silly poem waiting to be seen,
waiting to be.
If I can write, I do.
I do.
The quietest time of the day is when I hold my breath,
sit back and suck in my stomach, close my eye into thin slits
and whistle.
The room is only a room not judge and jury, not a system
of impossible fractions.
When I share this poem, shape the aftermath of a mudslide
into something compact and ready to be carried into the world
beyond the steel bars, I pretend my father
is in the back of the room, red, red baby.
Of course you want to know what my father must have done
to be locked up all my life.
How many drugs did he sell?
How many bodies did he leave without breath?
None.
Of course, dear reader, you cannot imagine a thief
so spectacular, so magical in his sleight of hand that he
left the world without a trace or manslaughter, or abuse,
or addiction.
Of course, of course, all of the above,
possibly a collage of victimless crimes.
No, just the audacity to refuse a plea.
Mercy, his nickname go.
I wonder as I am writing this in a time in which poets accuse
each other of noncommittal words like "wonder"
if I may interject this placement of the word
simply acknowledges that the writer, narrator is still
in search of an answer to the wonderment presented.
But lean in friend, let me tell you what I know.
The writer's father has been gone, gone, gone.
And so she fears she will never truly understand or know.
Yes, this moment of unknowing is her attempt
to completely level the obstructive field of vision.
It is ultimately an example of how the writer imagines her
father whole and how the writer deconstructs the intention
behind these daughter-sans-daddy-induced
theories.
Does he approve of my line breaks?
How strategic I can be, as I pass
his carcass throughout the audience like an offering.