The Lightness of My Whoredom

I

The lightness of my whoredom

Sways even the neocolonials.

Seduced, they nod their heads

And ejaculate as He plunders the five Continents,

Lit in strobe lights and bathed

In heliogenic megawatts, He floats

Between heaven and earth, Spirit and Flesh,

Black and white, male and female,

Man and child, a dirge of celestial

Combustion, the negrodization of the planet.

II

Bleached skin, mailed fist, spiked gloves

White socks, padded crotch, pale fire loins

In a happy prism of spotlight and

Shattered Pepsi Cola bottles.

A crescendo of electromagnetic voltage,

Sainted in sonar decimals and break-dance,

He floats from humanoid to God head

In a halleluiah of gyrating stars

Levitating on public gulps of Walk-Arounds,

Enlightening the Deo Volente of Madison Square Garden.

III

Like private parts, his sweat-tears fall

Upon his white clown’s face:

Spliced nose, electroed beard,

Kholed eyes, permed hair—even his heart

Is a transplant, a sexless dildo

For fourteen-year-old Virgins,

The walking wounded with the Mick Jagger prance.

He rides the rails, a moveable feast,

Sucking chocolate-covered Popsicles, entitled

SONY & PARAMOUNT & ATLANTIC.

IV

“What do you say we divest ourselves of

This son-of-a-bitch White Negro,” says Wall Street;

Thus begins the whore’s demise

Eulogized by Elizabeth Taylor and Toyota.

Can there be a greater claim to immortality than

A remake of Jesus Christ’s fastest selling video?

As for the color line, unlike Pushkin,

His uncomely Negroidess has vanished

Into plastic surgery’s immobile and lifeless eternity,

As unknowable as the sex of angels.

 

Requiem

I will leave your white house and tranquil garden

Let life be empty and bright.

—Anna Akhmatova

I

I think about you to the point of tears,

Catch the hundreds of intonations of your voice,

The self-taught justice of your smile,

The many alleys of your brilliant mind,

The bottomless reservoir of sweetness.

How could you leave so suddenly?

Drowning out the sound of my own voice speaking

Into the bitter virgin silence you have left behind,

Polite to the end, closing the door softly

On foreseen pain, everything upside-down forever,

In secret places never shown to me,

Laughing together in passing.

II

Thus you bear my heart away chilled,

Amongst the peonies which bloomed yesterday,

Where only my tears live and my fear reflected

In the serene waters of the Strait of Pertuis where patiently

I wait each day for one last conversation,

In that bronze twilight between being and not being, And the melancholy frustration of a loved one’s

Cancelled rendezvous. I can’t be angry.

I wasn’t there; only grief and darkness were there,

In my place, deep and velvety and above all,

Incomprehensible as are other people’s dreams, as is,

A distant light-house or a burden in an outstretched palm,

I don’t even recognize my own wailing voice,

Or the unsolvable riddle burning like a night lamp

Before an eternal door, eternally closed.

III

Your home is now the waters of Nantes where Nigriers plowed

Grown silent from the sun’s bright blaze.

Your limpid countenance and tender eyes

Watch from its depths the long day extinguished

and the even longer night when penguins

Dance on shore in a grove of singing nightingales

And illegal aliens take flight for the border.

You are quiet, resplendent as moonlight on sea salt harvest

Your judicial eyes are closed wide open.

Your lips curve in an arc at our ongoing dialogue

And incessant murmurings because: you are quiet.

Dark blue drifts over the sea’s lacquer.

My Requiem is no longer sorrowful, but radiant,

A copper penny thrown over my shoulder, slicing

The satin surface, a silver coffin.

IV

Rest. Rest. Rest Michel

Leave our sobbing and our prayers

Facing your magnificent smile

How bright the lunar eyes and relentless battle weary gaze

That has come to rest on the doorstop of Paradise.

Glancing back he cries: “I will wait”

Which like a wax seal on the heart, unique, valedictory,

Erases all remaining memory,

Forgiving all with a wave of his tawny hand so that

Each day becomes Remembrance Day. And can’t return!

But even beyond courage, I shall take him with me,

Hold to the living outline of his soul: “I will wait” he cries,

A sacred reproach from one who died to those who cannot

Imagine his death, which is neither a magnificent of roses nor a

Host of Archangels, but a gracious acquittal of the living.

—Paris, January 19, 2008
For Michele Fabre and, in slightly
different form, Ruth Bloomrosen

 

Bullock’s Liverpool Museum

I am most affected by this spectacle

And I must say, I am happy to be in the company

Of one of my own sex.

For I am ashamed by the pudeur and forbearance

This poor woman displayed

In the face of the brutish, pornographic,

Voyeurism of my countrymen (and women).

They pluck and prod this small creature and called her names

And verily act like a bunch of baboons.

The comedy of manners being exhibited

By the masters of the world

Towards its colonized slaves

Is more like a morality play of oppression

On one hand, versus a kind of defiance

Of all white English morals on the other.

It is not an amusement.

It is an erasure of time and distance

Between our civilization and its antithesis,

This African Venus

The irony of whose name is not lost on me or the audience

And even plays its part in this charade.

For the Venus is a parody of English beauty and womanhood,

As far from our pretensions of gentility

As one could possibly imagine.

Yet, there, in a cage … in the most dire

Primordial circumstances, the Venus

Has a dignity and a humanness that is totally lacking

In her spectators and puts them to shame.

I shed a tear. Mary does too—at her vulnerability.

As females we all are burdened

In the face of a male society.

I am revolted. I try as did several other ladies

To make eye contact with the Venus

To communicate the sympathy I truly feel

But there is no communication

Except insults and threats,

Neither between the public and the Hottentot

Nor between the Hottentot and the white females

To be sure she is ugly,

She has an enormous, astounding posterior

But her face is actually pleasant

And she is very young

She is now a household word in England

And a celebrity in London Society and the popular press,

Who use her as a plaything and political tool against Grenville

Not a day goes by that there is not

Another wicked, obscene cartoon

Or caricature in the daily press.

The politics of her, the obscenity of her

Her servitude is a blot on English Society.

But even the worse of scandals

Become romantic

And even respectable in two thousand years;

Witness Cleopatra …

The most virtuous read of Cleopatra with sympathy

Even in boarding schools and were she, by some miracle

Erased out of the book of history,

The loss would be enormous.

The same applies to Helen, Phryne and other bad lots.

In fact, now that one thinks of it,

Most of the attractive personages in history

Male or female, especially the latter, were bad lots.

And the true Venus?

Haven’t the most scandalous acts

In history been done in her name?

In the name of passionate, unbridled, and uncontrollable fornication?

Shouldn’t we love anything called Venus?

I ask gazing at this strange, humiliated creature …

If you are a woman?

There is nothing that makes our sex more aware

Of our own oppression

Than witnessing the horrendous, blatant

Torture of the brown races?

A brown member of our own sex?

I shudder to think I actually paid to see this!

This ink bleeds onto

The middle finger of my right hand

And no, I am not going

To denounce her suffering

Or write about her

Or recognize her

Wasn’t this why I love freaks?

I bless my stars that I have done with Tuesday.

But alas! Wednesday arrives.

—Jane Austen to her ghostwriter, Lady Eliza de Feuillide

Why Did We Leave Zanzibar?

Dark hallooed sister,

Penumbrae jewel

Burning in dry tobacco leaf beauty,

Brittle and flaking discontent,

Eyes damned with the silt of disappointment,

Lodged and sheltered in Public Housing,

Celled there tapping in Morse code on the bars of the mind:

The unspeakable that resounds through

The landscape of your nerve ends like orgasm.

Long-fingered, long-necked

Delicate wrist-ed and ankled sister,

Wide-hipped and smelling of honey,

Eyes echoing hollow words and unremembered places,

Fingers stuttering, tearing

And wrapping themselves around

The essential question:

 

Why did we leave Zanzibar?

 

Something in the line of the back spells

The irredeemable exhaustion of trying to make ends meet;

Those two butt ends of our amputated history,

Cauterized on the hot iron of self-hate,

Lusting after self-destruction

That we find in split vaginas,

Smeared with the muck of barbarians,

Birthing a race of orphans and madmen

When we could have stayed on the beach,

Heads severed and wombs filled with sand,

Clutching our ancestors,

Rejoicing in sterility,

Reveling in abortion,

Resplendent with infanticide,

Cursing the living with the last breath of strangled children.

You say we had no choice:

There is always one alternative
To rape and every woman knows

it

 

 

Dark-breathed sister,

Sinister survival worshiper,

Ready with the sword to smite the suicides,

Jailer for our prison-makers,

Grinding down our men with religion-pocked

Grins of satisfaction (Jesus Saves),

Crushing our defenseless sons with the jawbone of that Jew’s cross,

Dazed and concussed, they stumble into the street to play stickball

Driving their fathers mad with grief and shame

So that their rage is spent in our bodies

(Or better still, the wives and daughters of the enemy);

And how we both glory in it,

Smack our lips in rutting satisfaction,

Tasting curdled blood and milk

Left standing in the sun too long

By absent-minded missionaries:

Benedictus qui venit in
Nomine Domini.

Sassy, sweet-voiced sister,

Moon-browed and night-mouthed

In deepest song,

Lying on your back in cathedrals,

Content that another night has passed

Without murder,

Lying on your back in cathedrals,

Masturbating with the true cross (Sweet Jesus)

While black men thrash around with white flesh,

Listening for your hysterical screams resounding in the tabernacle,

Staining stained glass: those Technicolor prisms of Middle-Eastern legend.

And over all, Cleopatra’s asp hovers:

Sliding between legs,

That perpetually open route to power,

Posing the essential question on split tongue:

Why did we leave Zanzibar?
Sweet fragrant mango-stenched beach,
Breasts pressed flat against steamed sand,
Seeping through sieve-like flesh,
Carrying carats of ancestor dust,
Rattling like pearls in oyster shells.

Sleek, earth-dyed sister,

Madness glistening at your throat,

We could have stayed on the beach,

Clinging to the rocks like bats,

REFUSING TO MOVE OUR WOMBS,

 

Scraping them with flint,

Soaking the continent with the holy blood of martyrs.

Plum-lipped sister,

Sad and wild-eyed with my reflection,

I touch one apricot breast

As you touch one brassy one,

And we gaze into each other’s eyes

Like the criminals that we are,

Dark brown gall rising to the surface like oil on water,

Casting up that bottle-wrapped question

Flung into the sea by some desperate hand so many murders ago:

Why did we leave Zanzibar?

 

On Hearing of a Death in Prison

For George Jackson Blois, August 21, 1971

I heard

A wailing, mournful, sacred

Song,

A bitter, screaming, humping

Song,

A positively displeased Nigger’s

Song,

A Maximum Security

Song,

A river of bile,

Har-

Monica fresh filled with

Salty blood.

I taste it

Myself

Now.

I heard

A silent Georgia

Badlands

Song,

Flat-out

In the damned black

Of the American sky,

White speckled with

Filthy stars,

Spangled,

Cold as ice,

Cold as Hell.

Frozen over

Out there,

One

Dies.

I heard

A teeth-grinding, heart-stripping lover’s

Song,

A fine jazz ricochet of desire,

Drizzling gall,

Sex-starved and slave-chained in

Songs of sixpence,

The inherited penalty of pain

Passed from father to son in

Songs

Of penitentiaries:

San Rafael,

Folsom,

San Quentin,

Alcatraz,

Soledad.

I heard

A never-ending song of

Solitude,

Eleven years of putrid cement,

Nailed down

With bullets

And the

Constitution

For sixty-seven dollars net,

A song eleven years to sing of

Solitary confinement,

Excrement thrown,

The total death of pride,

The soul-destroying body search,

A rape of every aperture,

A curse so foul

Men cry.

I heard

Black notes on lined paper,

Barred,

Dropping wounded days

Of manhood lost

In gut-punctured, spine-shattered

Death,

Death of the spirit,

Death of the bowels,

Death in the white heat

Of a charred sunlit court,

So lonely it seizes

The heart,

That hoarded, dreamed of

Moment of Life,

The last.

I heard

A clamorous, clapper-tongued

Sound,

The holocaust of Easter Week,

A trenchant trill,

Quivering in heat over

The Entire Race,

Blue desert women,

Wind and sand whipped pillars

Stretching across Africa,

Tattooed hands held over

That obscene opening,

Kohl-ed eyes weeping

Colored tears for Colored Men,

Red veils aspired in Rage

In Rage, In Rage, In Rage.

I heard

A Song

So rich in gut and sweat

That any sperm would flower there,

And any Song

Rejoice in being

Not

For singing.