Tender Arrivals

Where ever something breathes

Heart beating the rise and fall

Of mountains, the waves upon the sky

Of seas, the terror is our ignorance, that’s

Why it is named after our home, earth

Where art is locked between

Gone and Destination

The destiny of some other where and feeling

The ape knew this, when his old lady pulled him up

Off the ground. Was he grateful, ask him he’s still sitting up there

Watching the sky’s adventures, leaving two holes for his own. Oh sing

Gigantic burp past the insects, swifter than the ugly Stanleys on the ground

Catching monkey meat for Hyenagators, absolute boss of what does not

Arrive in time to say anything. We hear that eating, that doo dooing, that

Burping, we had a nigro mayor used to burp like poison zapalote

Waddled into the cave of his lust. We got a Spring Jasper now, if

you don’t like that

woid, what about courtesan, dreamed out his own replacement sprawled

Across the velvet cash register of belching and farting, his knick names when they

let him be played with. Some call him Puck, was love, we thought, now a rubber

Flat blackie banged across the ice, to get past our Goli, the Africannibus of memory.

Here. We have so many wedged between death and passivity. Like eyes that collide

With reality and cannot see anything but the inner abstraction of flatus, a

biography, a car, a walk to the guillotine, James the First, Giuliani the Second

When he tries to go national, senators will stab him, Ides of March or Not. Maybe

Both will die, James 1 and Caesar 2, as they did in the past, where we can read about

The justness of their assassinations

As we swig a little brew and laugh at the perseverance

Of disease at higher and higher levels of its elimination.

We could see anything we wanted to. Be anything we knew how to be. Build

anything we needed. Arrive anywhere we should have to go. But time is as stubborn

as space, and they compose us with definition, time place and  condition.

The howlees the yowlees the yankees the super left streamlined post racial ideational

chauvinists creeep at the mouth of the venal cava. They are protesting  fire and

Looking askance at the giblets we have learned to eat. “It’s nobody’s heart,” they

say, and we agree. It’s the rest of some thing’s insides. Along with the flowers, the

grass, the tubers, the river, pieces of the sky, earth, our seasoning, baked

throughout. What do you call that the anarchist of comfort asks,

Food, we say, making it up as we chew. Yesterday we explained language.

Copyright Credit: “Tender Arrivals” printed in S O S: POEMS 1961–2013 © 2014 by The Estate of Amiri Baraka; collection edited by Paul Vangelisti; used with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Source: Poetry (February 2015)