摘选几首 (original) (raw)

After Another Country

Some dark of us dark,

The ones like me, walk

Around looking for

A building or a bridge.

We mumble and pull

At our lips, convinced,

Until we see how far

Down the distance.

We arrive to leave,

Calling ourselves

Cowards, but not you,

Rufus. You make it

To the George Washington—

Bold as an officer of the law

With the right to direct traffic

When all the stoplights

Are out—and you leap

Dirty against the whiteness

Of the sky to your escape

Through the whiteness

Of the water.

Bullet Points

I will not shoot myself

In the head, and I will not shoot myself

In the back, and I will not hang myself

With a trashbag, and if I do

I promise you, I will not do it

In a police car while handcuffed

Or in the jail cell of a town

I only know the name of

Because I have to drive through it

To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,

But I promise you, I trust the maggots

And the ants and the roaches

Who live beneath the floorboards

Of my house to do what they must

To any carcass more than I trust

An officer of the law of the land

To shut my eyes like a man

Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet

So clean my mother could have used it

To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will kill me

The same way most Americans do,

I promise you: cigarette smoke

Or a piece of meat on which I choke

Or so broke I freeze

In one of these winters we keep

Calling worst. I promise that if you hear

Of me dead anywhere near

A cop, then that cop killed me. He took

Me from us and left my body, which is,

No matter what we’ve been taught,

Greater than the settlement a city can

pay to a mother to stop crying, and more

Beautiful than the brand new shiny bullet

Fished from the folds of my brain

Duplex

The opposite of rape is understanding

A field of flowers called paintbrushes—

A field of flowers called paintbrushes,

Though the spring be less than actual.

Though the spring be less than actual,

Men roam shirtless as if none ever hurt me.

Men roam that myth. In truth, one hurt me.

I want to obliterate the flowered field,

To obliterate my need for the field

And raise a building above the grasses,

A building of prayer against the grasses,

My body a temple in disrepair.

My body is a temple in disrepair.

The opposite of rape is understanding.

Duplex

A poem is a gesture toward home.

It makes dark demands I call my own.

Memory makes demands darker than my own:

My last love drove a burgundy car.

My first love drove a burgundy car.

He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

Steadfast and awful, my tall father

Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.

Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark

Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

Like the sound of my mother weeping again,

No sound beating ends where it began.

None of the beaten end up how we began.

A poem is a gesture toward home.

Duplex

I begin with love, hoping to end there.

I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.

I don’t want to leave a messy corpse

Full of medicines that turn in the sun.

Some of my medicines turn in the sun.

Some of us don’t need hell to be good.

Those who need most, need hell to be good.

What are the symptom of your sickness?

Here is one symptom of my sickness:

Men who love me are men who miss me.

Men who leave me are men who miss me

In the dream where I am an island.

In the dream where I am an island,

I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.

Cakewalk

My man swears his HIV is better than mine, that his has in it a little gold, something he can spend if he ever gets old, claims mine is full of lead: slows you down, he tells me, looking over his shoulder. But I keep my eyes on his behind, say my HIV is just fine. Practical. Like pennies. Like copper. It can conduct electricity. Keep the heat on or shock you. It works hard, earns as much as my smile.