Cultural Revolution

Call me
Buddha
for curves,
metaphor,
taste,
and vindication.

Call me
Buddha
for melody,
comedy,
history,
and theology.

Call me Buddha,
climb the stairs,
cock your weaponry.
Here crows dine with lions,
and the sun tastes
Mandarin Orange.

Call me Buddha
for 14 hours,
for saving face
to praise mine,
for children licking
my Diet Coke
outside your Summer Palace.

Call me Buddha
in concrete gas,
dribble to dribbler,
Hello Kitty to bootleg,
bicycle for three,
flooded fruit
in alley coves.

Call me Buddha
tell me Gucci,
guzzle me with Prada,
give me good price
or beat me with broken English.

Call me Buddha
or fashion lady
or waiguo
or meiguo.

Call me Buddha
to make blue eyes communist,
to take Mao momentum
and create a censored empire.

Call me Buddha,
take a holocaust
and just push delete.
Take an eraser,
forget the names,
blur the faces,
and call him a hero.

Day 1, Poem 1: "Captive in Brooklyn, Commuting"


Gray-haired man
on the Brooklyn-bound F
holding twenty people
captive and miserable
hostage to your greatness

Do you see them
cringing?
Cursing those of us
behind you
who don't have
to meet your gaze?

Do you know
you scared that
woman
with a cello strapped
to her back,
holding on to her
young daughter

I don't think
she really
wanted to get off
on 23rd
I think she was scared
for her child

Your air-guitar
more like
obscene gesticulations
The crazed
gyrations
of a madman

Where are you
in your head?
Smiling
Enjoying yourself
Welcoming
boarding passengers
like old friends

Are you on stage?
Hosting a party?
For all these
things
I could forgive you
your
crazy bliss of
off-putting
yet harmless behavior

But your repertoire
sucks
I mean, come on
Queen of Hearts?
Shit, if you're
going to do
Juice Newton
Everybody knows
you go
"Angel of the Morning"
Ah, my stop
at last!

day 3 poem 3 Up Jump the Boogie

guys: this is an example of a ghazal. i'm enjoying the work that has been posted so far! post more. post more! and y'all who've posted nothing so far. get on it!! it'll be fun, i swear!


Up Jump the Boogie
for John Murillo’s book party

We piled into the upper room, sniffing for our kind
fiending one another, all different shades of black

reincarnated of another renaissance, we dressed
all smooth, so sharp we seemed blades of black

all tropes present, the diva queen, the lover king
the matron thick, the scandalous - all swaying to black

There was fried chicken, blues and copious bass
We hold tight to our history. Forgive us if we’re slaves to black

John, tall and stately, a funk renegade, a fist unfurled,
from head to toe, in grown man garb, my niggah swathed in black

poems mystical as a fist fight, thick as a pistol
the women sing his name in verse. Their hips swayed to black

Rum for Chango, spirits poured for all our dead
our gathering blessed, the ancestors keep us bathed in black

and I, Roger, honored to be among the called, the numbered
sing my song. I’m of a protected clan. We chant survive. We don’t just fade to black.

day 2, poem 2 - entreaty

entreaty



Father, I’ve been building

a body worthy of my own

lies, moving it from corner

to open field, from the insides

of dark cars, to the last

bleak bedroom I’ve inhabited.

I’m building it out of the lies I told

myself. I’n building it of the lies

I grew to believe of you – the thighs

of yours I’ve inherited from the foyer

of your bright, bright heart.



I’ve never wanted anything

so much as speed, so much

as the power of limb and fist

and heart; the stadium’s everlasting torrent.

I’ve never wanted anything

so much as to live

under your roof, to be a child

again, and so I revolted all the way

until my 40th birthday.



Father, when I was 18, I held a woman

down, in the front seat of my mother’s

Datsun, and when she finally relented,

I told myself it was because I wanted

her to stay. I pushed myself

into her and called myself a man

for certain. I did not think it rape

until almost 20 years later,

and while I am not alone

in this specific way of men

I wonder how the lie of your

returning again and again – how

the lie of my forever staying,

my body blooming chest and wrinkle

into your spitting image would have molded

me more a man, more capable

of the love I swear I feel

in my stomach but can never seem

to deliver to the women I call

Beloved.



Father, I am trying to rehabilitate

myself in women not yet undone

by me. They let me call them love.

They let me hold them hostage.

They let me live in so many years

whose memories hold you clear –

1974, 1981, 1987, 1994, 06, 07, 08, 09

and I am building out of those lies

a tenement with a thousand rooms.



Here’s a confession: I am not yet really a man.

Here’s a fear: I do not have what it takes

for anything other than a pursuit

which ends in speed, in a crash.

Here’s what I lay at the doorstep

of the morality you taught – you

were always taking your bows

and stepping back. And so

I craved your spotlight. I have

It now. You’ve bequeathed

me the most unfortunate grace,

a body built of granite, a tenement

of a heart, a craving

for nothing but the everlast ovation

that walking away from the stage

can give.

day 1 poem 1 - st lucia moon

i understand my poems weren't on here, so here goes...

St. Lucia full moon



The moon keeps the valley clear and the strip

of green signals the mangrove meandering like

a macajuel from the mountain road straight

to the sea. You’re tempted to a cynic’s wit

but the beauty opening up the verandah doors,

and another cold Piton, will not allow it,

though it is a sight over which she presides

nightly. Such is the magic of faith,

and though you have known her less

than fourty-eight hours, you trust

that she is true when she offers the bay

and any prayer you might say there

in the presence of stars as real and thick

a healing as you need if you could kneel -

to the smell of salt, the baying of dogs,

the hot breeze and the dark, blue-dark

signaling that something still survives

the vicious Caribbean drought – long enough.



When you were a boy you slept nights

or made love on a bay such as this and though

no sophisticate towards the symbols

in things, understood well-enough then

a woman’s invocation to stop and pay

attention to the magic in an evening

so perfect you sucked your teeth

at its overbearing and pregnant moon,

its hungry surf running up and lapping

at your insteps, drunk men in the rum shop’s

extemporaneous calypsos. You let her

put one finger over your mouth and stop

your careless jokes to listen – listen,

she had said, and then choose this sweaty

crooning love between your bodies right

there on the soft, hot sand.



You are leaning again on these old lessons

of wait and learn; this new, old way to hold

your own body so close and so precious

you’re damn grateful for your own crying

when it comes, your own anger when you

take the time and permission to claim it,

claim the violence and every available

laughter. But back to this second, therefore

because it is why every memory comes

flooding back, so when, later, half-awake

the beauty’s hands knead your back,

you are surprised at the lowing weight

of your own moaning. In another city,

a woman you hurt is re-learning (to love?) you

(and you her) all over again. This

pull over to the shoulder of your life’s

road is what saves you, what enables

you one more time the chance to survey

all the wreckage and hurt and laughter and

flowered brilliance of your days, and now

the sun, golden as soul music,

is coming up, all you can see is the way

fire, fire, comes on the morning, and the lush

green reptilian mangrove stalks the shore.



You’re on your knees repeating some

prayer or another, and it’s all ancient

this bowing to the sunrise, the way

your heart swells to bursting with the laughter

of it. How lucky you are for this second

chance. How lucky you are for the reprieve.

How lucky you are for this woman’s

talking to you again, the slow joy, of being alive.