It's my pleasure.
Thank you.
"Don't stick your head out the window.
They shooting everything that glows."
That's a personal quote from Nikky Finney.
"November sings in tongues through shivering trees.
Winter's tambourine stirs barbecued leaves.
Short day, sundown, cloaks, ancestral saxophonists,
savoring tropical memory perfuming the promise of hawk.
Soloing its biting lullaby of dusk, horn section
for everyday people.
Nana, tío, auntie, cuz, all hear tunes they want the wind
to play, to soothe ears stung by whine of bell-curved liars,
English only canters, Nordstrom scholars, one-note theorists.
My own soundtrack echo King Curtis,
blowing me a raspy escape route out the box
canyon of my mediocrity.
Fingering me a bridge to a safe place,
where Bobby Byrd invites me to repeat after him.
I know you got soul.
If you didn't, you wouldn't be in here.
Sitting in on the jam session of resistance,
searching my instrument for one grace
note pure enough to bop gun frontliners
who have exhausted their funk.
Horn section, tuned and timed to roll with the ball-bearing
needs of any era.
Comping for the call to hit me.
Accenting pleas of a Vietnam vet on homeless knee,
throbbing between fingers of men reciting the million man
pledge, praying she'll come back to me,
stretching time while she meditate,
strutting when she say, mhm.
Swaying when she hold me in her storybook arms.
High noon, sprawling from an orchestra
on the curve of a liquid sky, filled with soloists, begging
for the nod to eliminate altogether words,
to eliminate all words together, to eliminate words
all together, acts angled like Prez or unchained like Trane,
willing to leap into the wind, or worry a toothpick
as only a virtuoso signifier can do the do.
From mouth on machine, activated by inspiration,
vocabulary of sound daring us to repeat
when breath of turning seasons chill our intentions.
I know you got soul.
If you didn't, you wouldn't be in here.
Oh, I know you got soul.
If you didn't, you wouldn't be up in here.
Inside the mind, or outside the senses,
there are sacred places where doors spring open from pressure
of baby steps, where even squeak of hinges sound like Reverend
Cleveland's all-star choir, where lives of asthma get
resuscitated, and we can get on with the daily business--
making the streets of our world safe for men and women
to double Dutch in peace, slipping
like sound between the bolo ties,
waving and weaving at the wrist action of girls
with names that swing through the alphabet.
There are sacred places inside the city,
and outside the jails where rules heal, as whisper
of first notes, where even demands of commandments
fit like a one-off ensemble.
Where lives of sclerosis get massaged,
and we can get on with a daily livelihood,
making streets safe for men and women to play jacks in peace,
counting, singsong up past their tenses,
bouncing little balls, high enough
to gather scattered lives in one smooth grab,
with the wrist action of boys combing hair
before a lint-free weekend date.
There are men and women with sacred places inside who
surrender to the word without becoming vengeful missionaries
and crusaders, carrying spears, and scimitars,
and automatic weapons of conversion.
Uh-uh to the word of ruthless invisibility.
Get to the word of the gesture within the common smile,
the candy gesture, the gesture of peeled bananas.
The word of the common reprieve written
without commission from nobody's ruling class,
from nobody's royal decree.
Inside borders or outside jurisdictions,
there are sacred places with doors
fitted spiritual carpentry, with rules jigsaw of stone
contemplation, where men and women are safe to live long
as they supposed to, and die in their own unrehearsed moment,
with another good idea perched on the lip of their ever
ready tongue.