HOODIES

About suffering they were never wrong,

the old rappers, and though I hear

so many friends my age complain,

the new rappers are just

as burdened with wax

and the breaks. They too fall

for Bruegel, rock oversized

chains. Just look at “Bandz,” a jam

better known by the hook, Bandz a make her dance,

by Juicy J, the Tennessee rapper from Triple 6 Mafia,

known for his television show,

Adventures in Hollyhood,

a fish-out-of-water tale

where gangsters

wear cowboy hats and gold teeth

and do gangster shit

like drive golf carts with spoked rims,

like fistfight with no shoes while getting sushi.

Who knew gangbanging

was not just a city skill but also a rural tool,

who knew how to spell Arkansas,

trepidation, gang problem, before

the Bangin’ in Little Rock special, even if

Houston-based rapper Scarface,

of the infamously misspelled

Geto Boys,

warned us that

Your hood ain’t no harder than mine.

I thought of Houston as a needle

in the haystack then, and I once met

Scarface at an indoor swap meet in San Diego

infamous for gang shootings,

though it would have been more aptly named

a swap meat because, there, many men and women

traded their flesh iniquitously,

but I should have known

Scarface was right

because I once got in a fight

with some dude who looked exactly like Scarface

except not as wide or dark-skinned or really anything

vaguely similar

to Scarface,

except that he was black,

and I was scared.

And that’s the rub

of the Juicy J song,

it’s easy to hear his lyrics and be blinded

by the shine of yellow diamonds and sunglasses on stage

while a teen star sits on his lap

in a blizzard-white nightie

singing about sexuality.

It’s easy, I say, because of the beat, not to hear the wisdom

of lines like

It’s not a strip club if they ain’t showing pussy

in a world where full frontal nudity by women

is considered obscene

yet the secret garden of so many movies.

When it comes to contradiction, you can’t counter

the dick. Not even in a movie like Short Cuts

do we see anything more than The Fall,

not even when Julianne Moore’s

bottomless,

and the ever-autumnal foliage between her hips

burns six feet of orange,

red and yellow

do we not miss

the forest for the trees.

When I have drunk too much and expectation settles

across my body like a summer heat

that was so warm during the day

but so suffocating at night,

when I know no woods will stir, sometimes

I stare at my thighs with pity,

gaze at a ruler slumped

against his throne,

Hamlet, at the play’s end.

I have never understood how one person could lie down

and open themselves for another,

show that even finite places carry eternity, not a heaven,

but forever. Forever is dark.

A clitoris is like a teenager with a hoodie walking down an alley.

A penis is like a teenager with a do-rag walking in an alley.

Forever is near but they won’t admit it.

A poem ain’t a poem if it ain’t showing pussy.