The Book of Yeezus
After Kehinde Wiley, with a line from Danez Smith
Michael Jackson’s not even Black He’s a forgetting
No forgiveness in the wild Still the almost-crown a profanity
Of orchids Summer and summer and the air rancid
With several wars too old to name and I’m told
Too old to end There are histories worth dying for
But none of them are history yet Several flights stranded
The knife shrouded by its own predictable vanity
Soft basilica of an iris King of swoon and deniability
Bleached Conditional planet as if the moon were merely a draft
Of need The king the king the king My mother has been betrayed
By so many colors I forget the polarity of desire sometimes
There are whole years where the light dares to wound the blade
Where I am from whiteness is Conditional if/then Still
A fever of magnolias Forever Foreverever Foreverever
I don’t know much about the future but I’m offended
To be in it more often than I am not Summer by any metric
I am starting to believe that certain miles are irredeemable
It’s a beautiful day to tell my mother I once aspired to kill myself
I can’t even get that right The once as if this were conditional
I know too much about desire to believe myself Forgiveness
Is a kind of property meaning there are so many ways that I can’t
Afford it Religion is a labor told in long cursives of sweat
It’s how I’ve learned forgiveness and exhaustion wear the same face
In most histories I wound and wound until everything
In me is the same bad Consistency is a kind of virtue when your name
Is already a form of bondage No noun is safe So where do you gold from
In the country where gold is almost a verb? Vengeful as I’ve learned to be
Bright as the silence that citizens the gap between armor and its namesake
Inevitability at the end of everything one last form of governance
O the indignity of after
I don’t forgive it
O how grief will be the last thing we do together
I won’t forgive it
I told her everything about the train Long metal yawn on a loop
Despair gleams like anything desperate enough to make a name
Forgetting gravity My mother vitiligo’d like a king or at least white
As an open secret I asked for doves but my grammar is parched of wings
At the moment My mother who once told me I would rather kill you myself
Than let a man kill me over a man I invited God is what you make happen
Still a loop fails to keep a voice alive forever Carceral Instinct Champagne Moon
Mississippi Summer What if what gives me the capacity for mercy
Is knowing what I’d give to leave memory?
I’m not always looking for love just something to hold me
The way Winter accommodates the mutiny of Spring
Niggas better recognize I’m God No touch is more dangerous to me than me
I gild my teeth electric with elegy Every king becomes king after a failure of kings
King me in the country between us All the wars are quiet
Notes:
Audio version performed by the author.
Source:
Poetry
(November 2022)
