I talk facing away from the dead
They replace me with the change in my pocket
A penny that has yet to be invented
They say, “You have to know how to cut a throat on the way to cutting a throat”
After sleeping on a mattress made from two garbage bags of clothes
I became content with the small gestures of plantation fires
Playing with couch ashes, I realized how weird the universe was. It exists in so many places. So many random things. It interrupts me when I am trying to dream. Like your clay correspondence, Lord
To be transparent
I have twenty books next to a bullet
Like an old man giving advice at the beginning of a revolution
I’ve really done it, Lord. Explored the mumbles of my mind. Explored what’s naturally there. And I found no brainwashing. I found Africa, Lord.
I have a future
It takes place in the diasporic South
I have morning possessions
Modern militancy
I mean windows to the South
I will walk on a missile for food
I guess you will not want flowers for a few years, Lord
Will I be tied face to face with the country I murder
Merge with us, Lord
our old metal vs. the new metal
our old metal vs. a pool of meandering imperialist faces
A multiculturalism of sorts
The dead replace me with a comedian’s chest cavity
Instead of a chest cavity held tight
It takes a violent middle man for me to talk to myself
Stories that travel through other people’s stories
A song about a song
A hemisphere about a hemisphere
Stories that travel through a conquered poet
My mother remembers Africa, Lord
She killed on behalf of you, Lord
I wore a machete all winter and no one asked me what it meant
I read one thousand books in front of the world
What I do is fight poems
And sleep through decadent San Francisco prayer circles
Watch people play for post-working class associative surfaces
Or Recreations of a governor’s desk
ruling class art of utility
Playing find the sociopathic bureaucrat
A day white people scare even easier
Tv in a basket next to a ceramic baby
Wearing ceramic armor
Musket progeny fantasizing through the art of the poor
Their trendy latches locked before God
Black art hunted down like a dog
Hand over my friends, Lord
Lord, I think that I am going to die in a war
Unelected white people in my small house
Like A blues song of no spiritual affect
or dollhouse H-bomb
A pony show near dead bodies
Apartheid weddings that go right
Apartheid white people who give birth to mathematicians
The spiritual continuity of barracks and police stations
The chemical interpretation of a Sunday trip to church
Church smells in their pockets
A river mistaken for a talking river
No autobiography outside of small personal victories of violence and drug use
Made in the image of God’s trinkets
What white abolitionists confided in their children about
Chemical assurances that
They will switch from Black artist to white artist
Black God to white God
Black worker to white worker
I think about you cautiously, Lord
In the same way I think about my childhood, Lord
Foxhole Friday nights
Most of life is mute
Comedian points out the planter’s field to the priest
King sugar cane
King cotton
King revolutionary
The bottle is central
Containing all modes of shallow introduction
Introducing an unlisted planter class
Speaking about fever and balance sheets
And reassuring the masses
That we can figure out our fathers later
A priest took my mother lightly, Lord
Stood in front of the parishioners re-raveling
Fantasies about black art
Priest reading confidently
Before I broke him
And broke his parallel
After today, I have never been a poet before
A little brother watches his big brother’s friends
They lean rifles on shelter walls
They agree with me and call it literature
It’s a simple matter this revolution thing
To really lie to no one
To keep nothing godlike
To write a poem for God
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, “Someone’s Dead Already” was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.