in memory of Aiyana, Tamir, Michael, Trayvon, Eric

in hope of becoming who we have been waiting for 

I.

The whiskey cooled to a nail

circles the scent of the chasm a boy

leaves behind – an anarchy of limbs

distilled to the muscular pattern

worn by those who daily sour

the ink on their fingers with bile

press them against the glass jar

of history: pickled skin, sparks

colliding in the canyons of skull

even as they dig heels their silence

into cement, a smear of faces

straddling the speed of a bullet

the city blooms. Hatred, body, fire

civil punctuations on the note

posted again and again like spit

of the poor, polaroid of the damned

to the wrong address: it’s never been

God, only pain that is incorruptible

II.

We throw the words down like planks

bound by the rags of our rage across

what physicists call an event horizon

They tangle, knock against each other

propelled by the engines that churn

color in and through us colored people

(the weak splinter in a rapture of dust)

We conjure the other side, homeward

glance to scrape us clean of metaphor

but the eyes resist direction, implode

on the present, shifting train of flesh

classified, prototyped, unrelenting bas

relief, language staggering upon us

(What is this us anyway? Stratagem?

Proverbial currency? Certainly not fact

unlike the ghosts that crouch in the pores

of our faces, sucking the salt of days

that tick by unresolved toward complete

survivor’s amnesia – by which we nod

in recognition at each other’s still life)

How my body empties when migrating

birds drag the sun out of the blue, that

kind of hollow, un-skinned, memory

loosened, damp world spinning away

nothing but I pinging from leaf to leaf

Give me the lie instead that gives me

weight, agony by which I earn my place

III.

Thanksgiving in lieu of sick marrow, tin scraps

laughing off the edge. Flirtation: jury convened

in defense of disbelief. Febrile air. Bone Thugs

& Harmony on waves and waves of ice.  Even

the pulverized dead wafting in and out of lungs

“too heavy.”

IV.

A man I should not have loved said,

“There’s always guilt.”

I keep coming back to this.  Stain on a favorite

photograph.  I’ve never held

Michael. Aiyana. Trayvon. Eric. Tamir.

When vultures feed, what’s left is the hardness that angled

the body in ferocious light, revealed

futility. Come close, closer to see

my own blindness, the brutal demands of hope –

Chestnut Street, watching the city flex behind me

on the café window blood’s refusal

of skin’s ontology, even now

shafts of cerulean divide the streets, voices

muffled in the walls. The mouth on my neck

a lit match

V.

I can’t even.

I can’t even though.

I can’t even the odds (a man insisting the life he took was fiction).

I can’t even as hundreds lie prone on the piss-stained road, the whites of their eyes.

I can’t I can’t.

He said, “I can’t breathe.”

He said, “I’m tired of it.”

I can’t even with the dogs barking down the darkness, the dog I have been called.

I can’t even under camouflage of fire.  Even with phoenix in my DNA.

There is a debt that must be paid.

I can’t even if you say peace.