after “black art” by Amiri Baraka
english is bullshit/ unless tongued/ by a boat child/ come from the womb of some/ napalm land set ablaze/ he later calls a continent/ decolonization is bullshit/ unless there are no more rusty land mines/ to blow up the boat child’s cousin/ on the other side/ of the pacific/ i want a community of/ fuck your model minority/ type chinks/ i want a community of/ drown tom cruise in the village pond/ type samurai/ i want a community of/ anarchist math professors/ refugees holding a grenade to lady liberty/ vietnamese manicurists ready to rip off jane crows’ fingernails/ brown cooks who refuse to learn english putting laxatives in the tikka masala/ hmong grandpas marching down chinatown screaming fuck the patriarchy/ iraqi toddlers ready to bazooka their shoes at voluntourist kindergarten teachers/ adopted chinese punks making a mosh pit of jim crow’s ribcage/ afghan men making love in a mississippi barn as an eternal fuck you to billy graham/ undocumented filipino aunties papercutting darren wilson to death with their fake green cards/ i want a community of/ anyone at all/ poems are bullshit/ unless they make my acupuncturist mother/ want to shoot up the crosses of her baptist church/ with projectile needles/ make graffiti of what words/ she’s taken from the pulpit/ poems are bullshit/ unless my grandmother can scream them/ at chairman mao’s corpse until her dead children/ use their coffins as baseball bats in tiananmen square/ poems are bullshit/ unless they can impale the president/ with shrapnel from the broken bamboo ceiling/ poems are bullshit/ unless they are executive orders/ stuffed in molotov cocktails aimed at the white house/ i want a poem/ that will make my father love/ himself/ i want a poem/ that is not a eulogy/ for my country/ i want a south that is a home/ and not a hundred fifty year old exit wound/ i want a south/ that is not declared new/ every night a white cop/ decides to keep a brown boy breathing/ i want gods that look/ like my dead grandfather/ i want syllables that do not salt the field/ of my mother’s tongue/ every time she tries to speak them/ i want a joy they cannot steal/ with a history lesson
tonight, i am smashing all the clocks in the city
in protest of the time they have
taken from us
until the glass shards
become birdseed
for whoever comes
down tomorrow
to pick up the pieces
