It’s Important I Remember That They Don’t Have the Tools to Critique Me—

what she told me. What I honor. They, as unambiguous as Lyrae is:

black, bard, badass; svelte with flourishing braids; a singularity and

somehow all of them gathered as one like tributaries to the mouth of

the river of God—Gwendolyn and Lucille and June and—and I can’t

count all the ways I was saved that day, emerging wet from the ritual

to find myself sitting in some stranger’s living room, a writer who’d

been pushed out of their homeland by its persecutions, pulled into

America on the promise of asylum, the same America that commits

my own kind to institutions with routine and rarely second thoughts

signaling the presence of conscience, and while we’re on the subject

of right and wrong, know I’d read the news recently and retreated far

into my unfeeling before I received the blessing of her timely word,

walking in bloody boots through hallways leading to the chambers

where tenderness is said to rest in all of us by symbology, but then

I was called outside my bones again. And let me tell you, my friend:

you’ve never seen light before you’ve seen it. I swear, it’s as if with

the snap of a finger I could recite the very definition of gold without

needing to run yolk from the promise of a child, a happy day’s glow

spilling into the street like July’s laughter from a fire hydrant as we

left the house with folk who loved words and loved us—loved us—

so expansively. And less than two nights later we’re all throwing our

asses in a circle, cuttin’ up, working up what was an effortless sweat,

undeterred even as the music skipped on every hiccup of the fraying

wires, tethered just as strenuously to joy as ever, like always, trying

to catch a good breath, but I paid it no mind, no mind, no mind—no,

I wasn’t absent upstairs exactly, I was hyper-present; what a ghost is

to death I was to life, inside everything simultaneously—the sub and

the synth, the blown-off roof and hole-stomped floor, the rise of

their chests and the fall—and only nigga returned me to this plane:

my nigga, my nigga, a lyric left on my bottom lip like the sweet after-

burn of Hennessy, but yo, it’s like I was being called for, called out

of need since I know that word only has such resonance in a world

where we ain’t free. And, nah, we ain’t free, if you were wondering.

There are no shackles on me your eyes can see but none that I can’t

feel as if they were appendages divided from me by the occurrence

of civil war, a set of chimeless chains that could be yanked on and

bring me, even at my most upright, to my knees. And if it happens—

again—I suppose I could pray, there, at my literally lowest moment,

immersed in the mess they’ve made that I’m tasked with cleaning

up for the commendation of pennies. I hope I don’t get shot while

genuflect since that’s apparently a thing now in this country, but I

worry such a selfish ask won’t have sufficient fuel to reach heaven,

that the bastardized sparrow will burn up in the atmosphere as easily

as tissue paper. And I recognize I’m rambling now, but I’m likewise

increasing my odds of bumping into the point of all this since inside

the milk of me something was stirred by what she said, but it’s hard

to translate a muscular language to a verbal one just as it’s hard to

relate to folk who don’t consider their own demise fifty ’leven times

a day at least, and for that relapse not to be an injurious ideation but

an itch of practicality. What I wouldn’t pay for the chance to not pay

attention to every little thing—how they talk near me and how they

talk when they believe I’m nowhere near, what they do or don’t do

with each other that they do or don’t do with me, the questions they

feel quite content to ask me and the ones they never seem to though

I leave the door open, the window, the bleeding heart. I know them

so well, people who wouldn’t know me from the next in the lineup;

I know them so intimately you’d think I love them all, and the gag is

that I do, by some undesired miracle, and that is part of all this, too.

To say they don’t deserve my time is an obvious statement, but they

take it anyway because it’s all they know, evident as I recount every

transgression taking seconds off my time on this earth, summing up

to years, almost to the point I’m gone already, in response to which

I either swallow spit or spit out ellipses. Ask the wounded wall what

I know of restraint, the manifesto I’d pen with what pours out from

my punctured knuckles, though, perhaps, the poet was signaling that,

all along, I’ve been teaching the most important life lesson merely by

domesticating rage, confining it inside the margins of the flesh that

my parents made for me, the page my life is written against each day

in corrective red ink. And this seems like the appropriate moment

to divulge that her sermon came during a dialogue about poetic craft

of all things, but if poetry can’t be applied to how one moves through

this world then I see very little worth in it, which is where it started

for me. Poetry was a dead white thing in my life once, at the bottom

of the trash can with the doll of Jesus they’d tried pawning off on me

back in Catholic school, but luckily I already knew one for us, by us,

and thus found the inner-strength to soldier through the barren winter

of lyrical delight rocking a pair of big-ass Timberlands and other on-

trend threads a person of greater gravitas could’ve filled out better

around the shoulders. But I digress—since what I really mean to be

speaking on is how the Cavalier poets weren’t really doing it for me

during high school, not because their explicit sexuality or their taste

for material excess and ambitious proximity to the throne were such

disagreeable subjects to me, at the time revisiting rap’s mafioso era,

but because when we painted those same pictures as we preferred to,

our tongues spiraling like ballerinas and bullets, they sought the ban

on sale or talked down on it as being absent of any artistic merit, as if

a nation’s worth of people surviving subjugation is more science than

art anyway, for if that were true, then we wouldn’t have a culture and

America wouldn’t have great product to push to the rest of the planet

aside from all the bombs it seems much keener on dropping casually

like Funkmaster Flex, and I’d already grown tired in my young age,

so tired, of trying to prove I’m not stupid even above trying to prove

I’m smart. And those who doubt there’s a difference have digging

to do, deep into their pockets to get me what I’m owed for damages,

for emotional distress and all things it’s been made feasible to sue for

with solid legal representation. Funny, I once longed to be a lawyer,

little fool that I was, my back against a brick wall painted by spotlight,

rifles lined and aiming, in that night’s vision—legal fluency seemed

the only option for release from this burden because it’s the language

my nemeses speak in. I do know bad English from black, but I know

power even better because I’ve brushed up against it just as a person

in any number of neighborhoods around here may have brushed up

against a police officer. Maybe it’s needless to say I didn’t go down

an attorney path; I actually don’t have a plan at all these days except

evading the bullet and also the bullet points corporations thrive on,

as if any of this is simple, as if I, symptom of systemic dysfunctions

enveloped by skeleton and skin, am something simple. I’d only ever

be two-dimensional if airbrushed on a blank T-shirt and even that

would show depth to someone’s esteem for who I was with no one

else nearby, and all this means is that there is more to me or anyone

alike than being menace or miscreant, minstrel or misanthrope, or

murdered as all four would be with equal fanfare. But what I really

want is to know what they feel when their black friend dies in that

typical way for it’s maybe the only thing I don’t know about them,

while we practice poker faces and draft FAQs. Forget seeing eye to

eye for a second. Set aside the particular grammars of forgiveness

we use without pulling up the problem’s root: do they still feel full

people if they put the hammer down? And when they can’t answer,

make note that I can because I have those tools and also others that

shall remain nameless in order to remain purposeful. That’s how I

prefer it, besting all desertions of their decency, which I say since

you’ve caught me rare and raw tonight, sipping off the bottle top,

slurring my songs, hitting my two-step on beat every. single. time.

Damn—how blessed they are to be able to watch me work around

them—as illegibly as what the miraculous Phillis Wheatley wrote

all over her master’s walls, owned in the moment, I feel, solely by

an ambition toward self-definition I also try applying prodigiously,

bringing them to speechlessness, a shaming kind of silence saying

listen, leave me be because there’s no explaining me, thus there’s

no exploiting me: what only a history under thumb and foot helps

grasp before letting go, for one’s own good even more than mine.