Teahouse of the Almighty (6 page)

not to play me that way?

(The way I pray to be played.)

Mama say the Lord enters you in stages

(Play me that way)

First like a lit match under your skin

(Play me that way)

Then like an animal biting through bone with soft teeth

(Play me)

Mama say lie still and wait for glory

(that way)

to consume me

(that way)

Press my keys

(that way)

Press my keys

(that way)

Don't pay me no mind, lover.

I always shudder

when I pray.

IN THE AUDIENCE TONIGHT

for Philip

She is unnerved, anxious

at the state of the world,

but he insists that she uncoil.

The fluorescent light overhead

leaves her stretched bare,

vaguely ashamed of the ease

with which she's been translated.

In her language, exclamations

are held in the mouth

until they are too weak to escape.

They are both the children

of their absent fathers. His dad

was a sleek guitar neck,

hers a gritty dollop of Delta

cocky behind the steering of a car

propped up on northern wheels.

Their fathers are the dead

puppeteers who push them

toward one another

then pull them apart,

who jerk tangled strings

and teach them the blues out loud.

It will be hard to recall a time

when they were exactly

what they are now,

poised to become all of it

in spite of themselves.

His singing burns

like the blue sun

inked on his forearm.

She fully intends one word

to turn the earth's heart.

Such merriment

as the fathers watch their children.

They're those cackling, unruly ghosts

taking up no space at all in the third row,

the ones who tipped in

when the room's back was turned.

Guffawing until Camel spittle

and penny whiskey

spew from their grins,

they bob bony noggins

to the blue grind

and sing along.

They love that their offspring

waste their time so valiantly,

shapeshifting,

offering their verse and voltage

to crowds of solemn drunks,

hanging for all they're worth

to one cracking point of a star.

WEAPON ULTIMATE

The Nigerian women smeared

a thick line of Texaco's oil

under each eye, warrior warnings,

then crouched low and sprang

with the boulders of their bodies,

their stout ashy legs and mad wrists,

holding their paper banners with words

scratched out and respelled:

Give work to our husbands,

our brothers, our sons.

Give us light and water,

or pack now.

The pure singular force

of themselves.

Their glorious damnable throats.

You remember. Pack now.

Remember.

SCRIBE

My son, budding dreadhead, has taken a break from obsessively twisting and waxing his naps, swelling his delts, and busting rhymes with no aim, backbeat, or future beyond the common room. For want of a plumper canteen, the child has laid claim to a jailhouse vocation.

I'm the writer, Mama,
he tells me.

That's what I'm known for in here.

In my kitchen, clutching the receiver, I want to laugh, because my son has
always
been the writer, muttering witness to the underbelly, his rebel heart overthumping, his bladed lines peppered with ready-market gangster swerve and cringing in awe of themselves. I want to laugh, but

I must commit to my focus. I must be typical, single, black, with an 18-to-30-year-old male child behind bars. How deftly I have learned the up/back of that tiring Watusi.

I guess it's a poem,
he'd mutter.

Throw it away if you want.

And oh, I'd ache at what he'd done, the bottoms he'd found, the clutch he claimed on what refused to be held, the queries scraped from surface.
What are you chile?,
I'd whisper as I read. Could there be a dream just temporarily deferred wallowing in those drooping denims and triple-x sweats, could there be a poet wrapped tight against the world in those swaddling clothes?

He was the writer then, but now, reluctant resident of the Middlesex County House of Correction, he is
the
writer, sanctioned by the baddest of badasses because he has trumpeted the power of twisting verb and noun not only to say things, but to
get
shit:

They paying me to write love letters to their ladies.

I write poems if they rather have that,

this one big musclehead brother everybody be sweatin

even asked me to write a letter to his mama on her birthday.

They call him Scribe.

They bring him their imploded dreams, letters from their women-in-waiting tired of waiting. On deadline, he spins impossible sugar onto the precise lines of legal pads, pens June/moon dripping enough to melt a b-girl's hard heart. He drops to scarred knees, moans and whimpers in stilted verse, coaxing last ink from a passed-around ballpoint, making it wail:

please please babygirl,

don't be talking about not waiting out my time,

only five years left, that ain't much,

hey Scribe, Scribe, hook me up, man,

I ain't got no answer for this shit she sudden talkin.

Tattooed in riotous colors, they circle him in the common room, whispering to him beneath the surface of their reputations:

Got a job for you Scribe, got a job.

When the letters are crafted just right, copied over and over and edited for the real, the customers stumble through the aloud reading of them, scared of their own new voices. Too dazzled to demand definition, they scrunch scarred foreheads and whistle through gold caps at the three-syllable kickverbs:

I'm gon' trust you,
they tell my son.
I'm gon' trust you on this.

They don't want their softness. They don't want it.

You know, Scribe, damn, damn this shit SINGS!

You blessed man, you blessed.

I don't know what you saying man, but it sho sound good.

So I'm gon' trust you. I'm gon' trust you on this.

Then they copy the words in their own hand and send spun silk shoutouts to the freewalking world, hoping that a disillusioned girlfriend or a neglected mother or a wife-in-waiting tired of waiting will slit open the envelope and feel a warm repentant soul spill out into her hands.

And I must admit, as a fellow poet, I envy my son, this being necessary. Think of it. Which of us would refuse to try on the first face of a killer, our life teetering on every line? Wouldn't we want to craft a new front for everyone just once, to rewrite one moment of a life story, to beg for mercy on behalf of someone who has never known life on his knees?

And at the end of our flowery betrayal, that white-heat moment of no sound. In the steamy pocket of it, all we'd need is one person rising up slow, full of spit and menace, to say:

O.K.
,
O.K.
, I'm gon' trust you on that one.

I'm gon' have to trust you on that.

THE CIRCUS IS IN TOWN

And this time there's trouble.

Whistle-toothed carnies

blow their wretched sugar

into strained balloons of blood.

God's beasts, inflamed and loony

in unlatched cages, fuck furiously

across all species—lion with grizzly,

ape with his keeper.

The alligator woman claws at a hell

of skin, listens to her cunt snap shut,

and shrieks at what the moon has told her.

The baby floating in a jar lists to the left,

bumps its head hard against the glass,

slowly reveals a worming eye. The vague

chaos brings a smile to his swirling.

And I am standing on an old roller coaster

whipping through the dark. A sculpted lion's

head leers from the first car, one marbled eye

lost long ago to wind. No ropes, belts, or bars

bind my body. There is nothing to keep me

from flying loose and slamming against that

building with its ghostly cadre of bumper cars.

The ragged clack of my rises and dips disturb

and intrigue the growl-faced boy and the woman

balancing her sex on three misshapen legs.

Their milky, eager eyes flap locked,

turn up, upward.

I do not fall,

and this amazes me, amazes them.

Yet still I go faster,

the speed biting holes in my hair,

whittling scream to whisper,

blurring tempera clown leers.

The damned thing squeals up, up,

hugging the rickety matchstick track,

ribboning the sheet of grease-scented dark.

Up this insanely, the air boasts a simple pain,

and I gulp breath as feverishly

as the alligator girl scratches her skin

to find a soft, definite history beneath.

Watch me.

Watch along with the limber,

the slithering,

the toothless,

the doomed.

Dance in gleeful anticipation

of my plummet to the midway.

Stand by until I have fallen.

Let the freaks sniff out the parts they need.

Then separate the splinters of wood

from those of bone.

HER OTHER NAME

for Girl X, Chicago

The first thing we took away was your name.

We erased the bleak shame from each syllable,

blurred the image of your tiny body broken into

network sound bytes, snippets of videotape

with a swollen face x-ed out.

x
                
as in she is no longer a good girl.

x
                
as in two simple lines crossing

where a beating heart should be.

You were little, like we don't want to remember.

You were stutter-folded, you were beaten liquid

on those lonely stairs, your skin was slashed,

you were raped with a fist and sticks, insecticide

sprayed into your seeing and down the tunnel of

your throat. He must have held your mouth open,

stretching the circle, leaving moons in your lip.

The violation left you blind and without tongue,

wrecked the new clock of you. You were jump rope

in double time and pigeon-toed, navy blue Keds

with round toes and soles like paper, jelly sandwiches

and grape smash fingers, you, ashy-kneed rose,

missing rib, splintered and flinching through

a death sleep. In which direction do we pray?

To recreate you, they relied on ritual.

Weeping nurses gently parted your hair, the teeth

of the comb tipped in rubber, and dried blood

showered from your scalp like chips of paint.

They rubbed warm oil through the unraveling braids,

threaded ribbon through to the ends.

We will give you back your life

by pretending you are still alive.