Poet biography

A BLACK MAN’S PRIMER

if in car remain calm
at the one eye cyclops:
pullover. place hands
at eleven & three, assume
this will not go well. recall
brown, bell, martin, a trail
of blood. ignore the raven
hovering the rooftop. it’s not
a matter of respect, speech
or liberty, understand
survival means right now, if you
survive. swallow pride
as it can beget death. forget
about post racial—
news feeds update daily:
unarmed furgeson man shot
with hands in the air   .or.
police chokehold turns wrong
in staten island. again ignore
the raven & remember:
you the invisible boogie man,
a 3D fright, a chicken
coming home to roost.
open season means you—
the target zeroed into
a circling bull’s-eye—you
this not a game or test, but
sadly, you the game. facts
will be misremembered: he
lunged, appeared to have—
a bulge, looked wronged,
reached. a shiny object—
the raven hovering wants
your death. fuck that,
take a breath, & prepare
for the figure approaching—

POETICA (1): ART AS PROPOGANDA

forget about revisionist history or the body.
say xenophobia. but say it backwards, now

plainly, to the holy ignant this be not a test,
extract arizona from the alphabet take back

the illegal naming of things, take back natives
trying to love pilgrims pulled up by a helping-hand:

take back murderers who invented whiteness.
i am not post or post-racial or post-human. i am

color-constructed & you can’t take it back,
i am melanin, & perhaps ,we have lost our minds.

some laws are bullshit & poems need to bite,
spit venom, rebel-rouse. say muthafuck that:

rapid firing like machine guns into the absurd.
question: where is the espada of this generation?

fuck a law, muthafuck arizona, fuck beneficiaries
from plantations: okay say illegal now. perhaps

irony be a cold bitch, invert madness. rata-tat-
tap someone with love from a bullet who dares

to gain from privilege. say you must-be crazy
while digging a good-foot out of somebody’s ass.