This late day the ocean’s seashell innards
Toss around so slightly atop it
Sheen hovering purples, pinks, blues on its glossy surface
So calm the seagulls are holding séances on it
Muted chattering, clatching at their luck
To witness the salty softer side colorization,
Parliamentarrying, in place of rollicking shoreline chants,
Instead of Ho Chi Minh gonnah win-
-dow-trashing ruckus at scavengers’ sunset
The big birds’ beaks couldn’t be bothered,
If they dive-bombed that flat just once,
All the city of fish would be hip,
Especially with the frenetic shriekers
All out there floating up in their mystical silented bag,
So pelicans and ospreys boycotted today’s kiddy-park of a sea,
And the air above was
Lightened of prehistoric ploppers,
Empty partners of a no-show sea
Under the stilled waves rested a fishy peace
Though on that day, like everyday
For a thousand years, times thousands,
The heart murmur rolled in,
A reliability the body of man comes for always
(centuries of musicians rolling watery dice,
seeking to make that constant here and hush,
I say they need to keep trying to find that sound; & K P * say:
To the strange, unborn thing that is in all men.)
This grey trunk licking sandy soil
Bearing leafless branches brimming with lizards
So many, their tails intertwine like zydeco dancers
Seven… Eight… spreading, twitchy
A lithe orgy of dark beings…
Then into black widows they turn; by the sunmaid shadows,
Can I still be happy this next day (from yesterday)
Singing in my sea,
lost in the clouds during effortless back strokes,
from a conversation
that was not tight-chested
and carried with it clasps of titty memories?
Honey darlin’, you can’t eat a saucer of ginger to quench hunger,
though a couple of wet-sugared rinds of it
can sho’ ’nuff postpone
some kitchen thoughts.
I raised the sunning wasp by her striped lucent wing
Off Mom’s cinnamon crumb cake cut in half,
(the half from a proud little-round-baker’s affair,
that trick tasted like Drakes-o-matic nevertheless)
It had shared space on double dark blue porcelain,
With moist dried plums and pink pill pink cumadin
I put the cake on another luncheon plate
(a three dish lunch, a napkin of green flowered lines
yo, yo, yo, humble servant, I takes care of mines!)
Then lifted I the patient sting from the yellow tab cloth,
—in order to provide DameMum the prospect of a hornetless meal—
I’d set it down unstunned, to return it to low-tailed snacking
It acted like a cat blowing whines off a hallway wall who decides
to reward its coaxing servervisor—whose fingers are already
bloodied by a lid that said yes-we-can time to git red, then salved,
in the stenchy goo of tuna bits – with some hell-no rebuffs…
This catty wasp would not linger on the crumb’s remains’ crumbs
Despite a sweet ’nuff supply to keep hive alive
The little broad flew off, indignant, gliding, wings undamaged
(didn’t check her genitalia, but me dolphins are all girls too)
her stinger had not levitated any tight bumps
on my oh-my-hero forefinger,
always my hope during such hurried tennis court rescues
when deference to Service’s rhythm, allows no halting miscues
Take the embrace.
My friend Ruth said the gal reviewer “defanged” Baraka
after Newark lost him, all the way to Bamako,
by ending her critique nodding to his love poem which concludes:
“… your romantic laughter is what it was about, really. Life.
Loving someone, and struggling” —S O S: Poems 1961-2013
I liked Ruth’s idea the son-of-a-bitch
was brave and getting braver
that the New Wark Times was still
trying to put his ass in stir, punking him,
Taking away his shark’s fury
One more once… but
defanged. NO, just a def jam in his underground motherland,
just a dirt-drenched handshake in thought
on the factory floor… a love poem,
Love poems… they were all love poems, unborn innards
floating and pondering, walking and pissed off his love was
muy mako. To take in all the black sea’s ginger embraces.
That evening sea and Amiri’s love poem…
The red notes of Anamar Sandlight.
* K.P. used to play guard for the Phoenix Suns with a purple pace above all the rest – add in the black arts moves of Earl the Pearl – and you got Kenneth Patchen’s Albion, dancing strange and naked and making sense in the moonlight.
April 13, 2015