Vernacular Owl
for Amiri Baraka
Old Ark,
how funky it was, all those animals, two of every kind,
and all that waste, the human shit somebody had to clean up.
Somebody, some love you hugged before fear,
the fear of an in-sani-nation, the No Blues, ruined your bowels.
Go devil.
Public programs
like
Race.
Dems a Repub
of Dumpster Molesters,
Congressional
whole-part bidders on your ugliest clown.
Left wing, right,
the missing moderates
of flightless fight.
Private
like
the Runs.
God evil.
Somebody had to clean that shit up.
Somebody, some love who raised you, wise.
Feathered razors for eyebrows,
alto,
tenor.
Wasn’t no branch.
Some
say
a tree,
not
for rest either.
For change.
When was we a wild life,
long-eared
and short. Prey,
some prayed for
the flood. And were
struck by floating,
corporate quintets
of Rocks and Roths,
assets bond Prestige.
First
Organizer
ever
called a
Nigga,
Noah,
but not
the last
Occupier of Ararat
... got thick
on
Genesis
and electric cello, cell-phone-shaped UFOs
fueled by
the damp, murdered clay
of divinity-based
Racial
Mountain
Dirt.
Somebody had to clean that shit up.
Some native body,
beside the smooth water,
like a
brook
Gwen say,
“I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.”
Chaser if
you straight.
Ark Old
Ark New
Ark Now
Only Only
Sidney P Simple JessB
would would
____ Spencer T ____ Dizzy G
to turn to accent
the dinner the p’s
cheek. not the “ ... nuts.”
Change the record, Record Changer.
Name
Change
the changing same.
Something only you could Art Messenger
& dig in any chord.
High water, like the woods of secrecy,
always a trail a ways a coming.
God evil.
Move the “d.”
Go devil.
The Mosque watchers know.
Also de wind, de wind
and de Word, spoken and written,
hidden in love
with the intestines
of Testament.
Eyes like
a woman’s fist,
her hard facts — not the crying,
domestic consonants
“of non being.”
Soprano,
piano,
or the cultural cowardice
of class,
in any chord
of standardized “sheeit” music, lowcoup risks slit.
Though flawed, too,
by penetrable flesh,
some blue kind.
Unlike
a pretty shield,
loaded free.
Wasn’t just Winter
or lonely. Those.
Wasn’t just Sundays
the living did not return.
Crouch if you a bum or one of Mumbo Jumbo’s reckless,
poisonous reeds. A neck crow man ser vant n
a jes’ grew suit.
Us am,
an unfit
second
Constitution.
Us am, an ambulance full of ...
broke-down,
as round as we bald.
Obeying
hawkish
eagles.
Why the young Brothers so big, what they eatin’,
why they blow up like that, gotta wear big white tees, gotta wear white-
skin sheets, like maggots, like lard, the domestic oil of death and klan
sweat, who blew them up, doctored, who pickin’ them off like dark
cotton, make them make themselves a fashion of profitable, soft
muscular bales, somebody got to clean this shit up.
All us, us animals,
on one floating stage
we knew
was a toilet,
the third oldest in the nation, unreserved.
Wasn’t no bank
or branch.
Yes we Vatican, despite Alighieri’s medium rare, rate of interest.
It
was
confirmation.
Some say
black fire
wood.
Some love that changed our screaming
Atlantic bottoms
when all we
could be
was thin olive sticks
with battered whore-ti-cultural beaks, and eastern screech.
Flushed, too, every time the Yew Norker
or one of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s traitorous X Jedi Clampett hillbillies
fresh prince’d us ...
The real religion,
our “individual expressiveness”
wasn’t dehuman-u-factured
by a Greek HAARP
in a Roman uni-dot-gov-versity.
Where we Away
our Steel, “flood”
means “flow.”
Where we Tenure
our Ammo, “podium”
means “drum.”
Flood,
flow.
Podium,
drum.
Flood,
drum.
Podium,
flow.
Drum,
podium.
Flood,
flow.
Used to be a whole lot of chalk around the Ark,
then anger, then angels, their wings made of fried white dust,
fallen from when the board of knowledge was public and named
after a stranger or rich crook, an anti-in immigrant-can’tameter
stretched across the teepee-skin, chairs of class
where we clapped
the erasers,
fifty snows old,
like we were
the first Abraham,
where we clapped
the Race Erasers
and drove away
from K James V and K Leo PB
in shiny Lincolns,
sprinkling holy sheeple from the sky,
their
powdery
absolute
Rule.
Just add oil-water.
Belongs
to humanity.
Just add sugar-rubber.
Belongs
to civilization.
Gold.
Days.
Nights.
Ounces.
A forty.
Mules move.
A forty.
Move.
Move.
Move
mule.
Whatchamacall “how we here,” and get no response ... how
we ... where we fear, how we hear how we sound and how sometimes
time is some even our own sound fears us, and remembers the first us,
confronting Columbus with thunderbolts, when “was-we” not good-
citizen sober, “was-we”voting and drowning, and rotting like “we-was”
the armed guts of our young?
Now a daze,
tribe-be-known,
the devil
the best historian we got.
Anyhow.
