Felon Read online

  with all the crystalline brilliance I saw when

  my boys first reached for me. This world best

  invite more than the story of the children bleeding

  on crisp fall days. Tamir’s death must be more

  . . .

  than warning about recklessness & abandoned

  justice & white terror’s ghost—& this is

  why I hate it all, the protests & their counters,

  the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies

  of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces

  humanity to the dichotomy of the veil. We are

  not permitted to articulate the reasons we might

  yearn to see a man die. A mind may abandon

  sanity. What if all I had stomach for was blood?

  But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir

  & I am bound to be haunted by the strength

  that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist

  the temptation to turn everything they see

  into a grave & make home the series of cells

  that so many brothers already call their tomb.

  IN ALABAMA

  A MAN DROPS A COAT ON THE SIDEWALK AND ALMOST FALLS INTO THE ARMS OF ANOTHER

  for N.D.

  as in almost Madame Cezanne in Red,

  almost falling, almost no longer—as in

  almost only bent elbows, almost more

  than longing, almost more than unholy,

  more than skag, white lady, junk, almost

  more than the city eclipsing around them . . .

  Winchester Gun Factory’s windows as broken

  as the pair refuse to be, the two of them

  nodding off of diesel, almost greater

  than everything missing, the brown sugar,

  the adrenaline slowing them down,

  the remnants of a civilization emptied

  into their veins. The falling man grasps

  at the air. Lost in a trance.

  These two, anchored by a coat that nearly

  slips from a nameless man’s fingers

  as he leans parallel to the concrete,

  as his arms reach for something absent.

  Whatever about reaping. The men eclipse

  the sidewalk, & everything else around

  them & they sway with a funeral’s pace.

  These two, their bodies a still-life lover’s

  . . .

  drag. I’m in the car with Nicky & we cannot

  stop watching. I imagine one whispers I wish

  I never touched it. But who, in the middle

  of a high that lets you escape time utters

  such bullshit. One lacks sleeves; the other

  throws seven punches into the air

  like an aging featherweight. I learned to box

  desiring not to be broken or haunted by

  my dreams. & when Boxer throws six

  jabs at a cushion of air, I know once

  they both wanted to be something more

  than whatever we watching imagine.

  A car stops in the street. No hazards.

  Just stops. & a photographing arm extends

  the camera offering history as the only help

  the two will get: a mechanical witness.

  I photo them capturing this world slowed

  to loss, the two men now someone’s memory.

  One almost caresses the face of the other.

  Lovers are never this gentle, are never this

  close to falling & never patient enough to know

  that there is no getting up from some depths.

  A perfect day that’s just like doom. Own so

  fucking world. They lean into each other

  without touching. Horse has slowed down

  everything. High like that, you can walk for

  . . .

  hours, & imagine, always that there is a needle

  waiting for your veins. & Nicky says it’s a wonder

  how something that can have you hold another so

  gently could be the ruin of all you might touch.

  CITY OF THE MOON

  for JB

  There walks a man, somewhere,

  Wanting the touch of another

  Man & somewhere people know

  That desire; name the walking man after

  You—Jericho, because G-d once

  Promised to bring a city to its knees

  For the man circling you with

  His trumpet. Going down from

  Jerusalem a man broke another

  Man, they say, those men lost in

  Gospel & what G-d can’t fathom:

  Odalisque & outstretched arm. They

  Don’t know every love is a kind

  Of robbery. And sometimes hurt

  Is a kind of mending. A body only

  Broken by death. Every moan ain’t

  A cry. This is always about vulnerability.

  How others afraid to touch a man

  Who touches a man have need to

  Imagine hips & the flesh they flank

  As a confession: the body threatens.

  Call that fear suffering. The heathen

  Is always afraid of a warm body

  Against his own. & while some say

  Things always return to a man

  & his desire to be touched, & touch,

  That want to be known, governs us all.

  DIESEL THERAPY

  His mother told him. Airport bars always pour something nice. Distance makes bartenders understand suffering. That Thursday he was headed fourteen cities away from anyone he knew & the brown was fortification. His daddy built houses. Those that grown men create in their mind & lock themselves inside. The doctors called it bipolar but his moms just said his pops had some shit with him. Turned his head into an airport. He was always running away from something, always fourteen cities away from the people that loved him, even if they were in the house with him. Everything reminded his father of the feds. He’ll say his father taught him to crave brown liquor. Lighter fluid for the brain he would say, as if he, the father, thought it would drown out the noise. Half a dozen years out of prison & every time he walks into an airport he thinks about his father. When he stares down a nice long taste of whisky, he almost wishes there were voices in his head he wanted to drown out—wishes the distance he traveled was something with him, & not the way he stole away from things he couldn’t handle.

  IF ABSENCE WAS THE SOURCE OF SILENCE

  some things my sons would never hear,

  not from my reluctance to speak,

  or the thief that has silenced his mother’s

  tongue, his grandmother’s tongue,

  turned the stare of the woman who, when

  it’s far too early for the sun to be out,

  sees me turn a corner with a Newport,

  the sky & the ground as dark as the fear

  & yesterdays she swallows as she crosses

  into what might as well be oncoming traffic,

  remembering a man from her past—

  stories my sons would not know,

  not because of a need to hide history,

  those bedrooms & boardrooms & work

  where trust became carnage;

  no, these things would be Pandora’s box

  untouched. & yet, they will know—because.

  & the because is what I tell my sons,

  about what their hands might do, in long

  conversations about what the hands

  of men do. Their hands, my own.

  When I was twelve, a friend

  told me of men offering her money

  for her slender & young body, she

  no older than me then, arms not strong

  enough to carry her own weight, let alone

  push her past the men who wanted

  to own what is hers. Hers just the first

  of a story that would keep returning.

&
nbsp; The numbered hurt. Rape, its aftermath

  & this account of trauma my boys

  would never know if the world differed,

  if war did not mean soldiers demanding

  the body of a woman as land to plunder.

  I keep trying to turn this into sense.

  From me, my sons will hear a story about

  how hands like theirs, like mine, made

  something wretched of the memories

  of women we love or don’t know at all. This

  is true. & there is a map to take us to

  all that hurt. Some silence saying it all. But

  let’s say the world is ours. On that day

  all the silenced tongues would have

  speak, without fear of being doubted,

  of the cars & hellos that became dungeons,

  of friends who became the darkness

  that drowns all until only rage & sadness

  remain. & maybe after, we can build

  memory that does not demand silence;

  all the things that happen now, as if

  a part of being, would not be—

  & my sons’ lives would be carved

  out of days in which their hands

  & bodies do not suggest weapons,

  days where all their mothers

  & sisters can walk down any street

  in this world with the freedom

  that comes from knowing

  you will be safe, after dusk or during

  those moments just before dawn

  unlike today, & yesterday, & now,

  when, the quiet & what might ruin

  it, is the threat that circles.

  ESSAY ON REENTRY

  At two a.m., without enough spirits

  spilling into my liver to know

  to keep my mouth shut, my youngest

  learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell,

  a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky,

  but History: I robbed a man. This, months

  before he would drop bucket after bucket

  on opposing players, the entire bedraggled

  bunch five & six & he leaping as if

  every lay-up erases something. That’s how

  I saw it, my screaming-coaching-sweating

  presence recompense for the pen. My father

  has never seen me play ball is part of this.

  My oldest knew, told of my crimes by

  a stranger. Tell me we aren’t running

  towards failure is what I want to ask my sons,

  but it is two in the a.m. The oldest has gone off

  to dream in the comfort of his room, the youngest

  despite him seeming more lucid than me,

  just reflects cartoons back from his eyes.

  So when he tells me, Daddy it’s okay, I know

  what’s happening is some straggling angel,

  lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his

  duty, lending words to this kid who crawls

  into my arms, wanting, more than stories

  of my prison, the sleep that he fought while

  I held court at a bar with men who knew

  that when the drinking was done,

  the drinking wouldn’t make the stories

  we brought home any easier to tell.

  IN HOUSTON

  NIGHT

  In the night,—night asleep, her eyes, woman,

  my woman, I name her as if she is mine,

  as if these hours that pass for the night belong to us;

  my nights belong to the memories I can’t shake; my night

  & this woman, my woman she tells me how it wasn’t

  supposed to be like this. This insight another Hail Mary,

  another haymaker. We live somewhere between almost there

  & not enough. Almost there. Her dreams & all that she lost

  for me is a kind of accounting. My woman, not my woman,

  not this night, not these nights: the mine is less mine more

  hurt. More hover than anything else. Shadowcloud.

  Or as she says it, you stalked me until I submitted. Love

  shapes itself into my hands wrapped round her throat. Have you

  loved like that? I’ll call your PO is the thing she says,

  on this night with the men I robbed still lingering, a threat

  to the freedom I imagined she gave when we became

  cliché: naked, tangled. This is always about me,

  how violence called to me like my woman moans when she

  thought all this was the promise of more than a funeral.

  When I grabbed her like that the first time, her legs held me

  tight. My woman thinking the cells in my past can make

  . . .

  her control this: all the ways I starve. She threatens

  to call my history back as a constraint on madness.

  She stared at me, once, & said she saw her brothers

  doing life in my eyes. In this night, when we talk to each other,

  it is in shouts. The quilt of solitary cells I’ve known confess

  that my woman has never been my woman. How ownership

  & want made me split that bastard’s head into a scream

  is what I’ll never admit to her. What she

  tells me: prison killed you my love, killed you so dead

  that you’re not here now, you’re never here, you’re always.

  Her eyes closed at night & I awaken & swear she

  stares at me, she is saying that brown liquor owns me, saying

  that the cells own me & that there is no room for her, unless

  she calls the police, the state, calls upon her pistol, & sets me free.

  ESSAY ON REENTRY

  Telling a story about innocence, won’t conjure

  acquittal. & after interrogation & handcuffs

  & the promises of cops blessed with an arrest

  before the first church service ended, I’d become

  a felon. The tape recorder sparrowed

  my song back to me, but guilt lacks a melody.

  Listen, who hasn’t waited for something

  to happen? I know folks died waiting. I know

  hurt is a wandering song. I was lost in my fear.

  Strange how violence does that, makes the gun

  vulnerable. I could not wait, & had no idea

  what I was becoming. Later, in a letter, my

  victim tells me: I was robbed there; the food was great

  & drinks delicious, but I was robbed there. I would

  consider going back. He said it as if I didn’t know.

  Why would he return to a memory like that?

  As if there is a kind of bliss that rides shotgun

  with the awfulness of a handgun & a dark night.

  There is a Tupac song that begins with a life

  sentence; imagine, I scribbled my name

  on the confession, as if autographing a book.

  Tell your mother that. Say the gun was a kiss

  against the sleeping man’s forehead,

  say that you might have been his lover & that,

  on a different night, he might have moaned.

  ESSAY ON REENTRY

  for Nicholas Dawidoff

  Of prison, no one tells you the time

  will steal your memories—until there’s

  nothing left but strip searches & the hole

  & fights & hidden shanks & the spades games.

  You come home & become a parade

  of confessions that leave you drowning,

  lost recounting the disappeared years.

  You say fuck this world where background checks,

  like your fingerprints, announce the crime.

  Where so much of who you are betrays

  guilt older than you: your pops, uncles,

  a brother, two cousins, & enough

  childhood friends for a game of throwback—


  all learned absurdity from shackles.

  But we wear the mask that grins and lies.

  Why pretend these words don’t seize our breath?

  Prisoner, inmate, felon, convict.

  Nothing can be denied. Not the gun

  that delivered you to that place where

  . . .

  you witnessed the images that won’t

  let you go: Catfish learning to subtract,

  his eyes a heroin-slurred mess;

  Blue-Black doing backflips in state boots;

  the D.C. kid that killed his cellmate.

  Jesus. Barely older than you, he

  had on one of the white undershirts

  made by other men in prison, boxers, socks

  that slouched, shackles gripping his shins.

  Damn near naked. Life waiting.

  Outside your cell, you could see them wheel

  the dead man down the way. The pistol

  you pressed against a stranger’s temple

  gave you that early morning. & now,

  boxes checked have become your North Star,

  fillip, catalyst to despair. Death

  by prison stretch. Tell me. What name for

  this thing that haunts, this thing we become.

  ON VOTING FOR BARACK OBAMA IN A NAT TURNER T-SHIRT

  The ballot ain’t never been a measure of forgiveness.

  In prison, people don’t even talk about voting,

  about elections, not really, not the dudes

  you remember, ’cause wasn’t nobody Black

  running no way. But your freedom hit just

  in time to see this brother high-stepping with

  the burden, with the albatross, willing