In the dark unlicensed room
The fear of light waylaid any thing except
The people who didn’t know where anything was.
They could whisper anything, to anything, but could not sing.

Instead, the bled head, and the lies yet to be
Said, collided inside the panorama of future amazement. They had seen
The television, read the New York Times, listened to madmen and fools
And wanted to laugh, if they had lips. So they sat under themselves and
Tried to understand weeping.

This was not Ramadan, or Christmas, or Yom Kippur, or The wooden jelly
Bells of the old plantation when your relatives was there, considering murder.

And Lo, that’s what they were, then, to them, and when that passed, they sat up
Gasped a few notes that the critics, Shaitan bless’em, called “Rag”. And so passed into
The great millennium of Nina Simone, singing, “Oh, Lord,
Don’t let me be misunderstood!”

The darkness wedged itself inside the colorless person’s throat, and when he sang
It rang, bang-awang-gang. And silently, like truth, some youth put on different colors and made old people mad for having to feel like that all the time.

The unsaid mischief of blue street dimly lit, where the footsteps hung
So no one would mistake what they couldn’t see for what had never been.

A lady like a magazine Bird, costumed in colors that whistled and stomped, preyed on the disarranged minds, a Wooly bully teeth & stomach smiled like weather reports and said stupid shit to confirm he was as important as the unswept floor of the colored church where everybody had to be happy because God was watching.

You say, “I wanna Cry, but don’t let me die, cause I won’t lie, etcetera, smash. “ No cataclysm except the bubbles.
No crucifixion, except we had been lied to.

“Let us know when we can sing”, you sd.
“Nothing complex, like the Jelly Glass concertos, writ last semester when smiling was accepted.”
So now in the same gloomish castle of unfettered conceit, where some Negroes won’t even eat meat, and others
Have no teeth, and some more, got a cross they bore, and more than them, includes me and you , Jim.
In that wrestled downpour of sudden silence, the lights pitter twinklings of dim regard. And lost people whine
They have received no reward, and the logarithms of justice are unsolved
And hide in wrinkled documents otherwise stuffed with lies
And nobody got on a bathing suit or pilot goggles, and the statues
Won’t move, since they too old, like Kenny G, to go to Iraq
With “The Natives”. And the policemen won’t hold a decent conversation
Before they pull the trigger. Bang Bang Bang, etcetera.

Just a sliver of light, an innocent song, would save us. But alas, is that all
In the past, with Movie heroes and the United States?