Tonight, The Mayfly

The mayfly’s elliptical
end looks like some ruined plan
What’s buried beneath
islands? Not the catacombs
of blended footprints
coalesced, and the entire
gathering of the missed who
wait at the prisons’ gates
If a kingdom ever spawns beneath my shifting
skin, give me claim to another earth,
until all my confessions have fallen
like ghetto cobwebs
The wound of another excavation, the sacred
books of whose viscous clouts of invented ancestry:
I demand answers if only for the few ?hours I have left
Entering this world—I grow tired under the
artificial red of this flambough-night
Whose letterheads grow tired of my ruse
What actual figures fail
in the new stomachs you hope
unaltered, will calm the seas
that make my-selves unclear? I count the brittle
bones at the foundation of a family underhand—
In vas(in)deference, give me
any stake in a calling
higher than my double-visioned self.
I am yesterday, there, and then not—
In a dream I hold savage.
Open to strike February into mullet,
daughter, gestating son, miss teach,
choir-girl never nun to a mother’s discontent
Some sonorous exfoliate
Every feathered memorial in which we are like mayfly subjugations
to what’s still, a one-way glance through the window of some moving craft—
We do not suppose
Pompeii more tragic
than our invisible ports,
bearing all our children into
the potholed plan
of that inheritance.
So, tonight
between our teeth, between
index and thumb, between
washes of coral
and the immobile Achilles:
these pronouns balanced on middle
finger, this side of the chained meridian
level even the brass of your statues
Here dissect the hereafter:
commonwealth
cistern from palm-woven basket
dracula from la jabless,
René Descartes from Sesenne Descartes
Irish moss from the grilled pigtail
Decline into the mauby valley, unearth your tune & reverse time
Why choose sides when you’ve found the doctrine of sudden bloom
Well, that strandy radio beep
Kinks in the muddled script—
This time, choose not to hear
That ethnic name in dewlap misnomer,
or color codes to streak like hair.
We are not your fingertip calling wind—
Into your own insatiate coffers, bate for
single ounce ghetto-youth outpaced on
corners, swapped for palladium stars pinned
to your chests. Who rigs these four-by-four
cyphers between their bars
between charcoal & wall & banks the coloured loot
Looped tracks are these that pile up
in the trodden mines of the black mouth—the day is brief
A minor place for the Mighty Sparrow’s dying,
Here TuPac fumes the breeze with Beethoven
These networths sway through us brightest when telescopic
Yarded and beating, like bars across the skull of the earth
Count on us to stay anchored, pound for pound,
A million small lives
With no irrational fear
of flashing lights--
That long way to Goblëki & Mayfly
Hoards! What joy to outlive the fishflies
Without ever loving the mirage
music of the chain-link
Fence off
The ghetto