Get Thee to the Big City!

I’m garden hungry these days. They told me I just needed a bar so I tried that but I have
a vision of a greenhouse I can’t shake. No, I don’t know about the separatists. And by
that, I mean I truly don’t know. All I know is that sometimes I wear a baseball cap and a
muscle tee when walking down the street and all the people stare and I think something
precious in me gets overexposed and burnt. I dream about a place with different dirt. A
landscape energetic and vast. Dream of a place where I’m not watched instead of a
place where I’m watched in the right way.

But you can’t have my money. ­
                –Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, in conversation with a Black Lives Matter leader

& you can’t have my phone. slide & divide my nothing no more. play my beats or eat my cake in the bathroom stall while your wife pour it up & oh she can’t have that no more neither. can’t have my rows in your head wired down with my cousin acrylics & DAX. can’t have my sidewalks littered with my dead once called your kill­­ that’s my head. can’t have my beats & I can’t emphasize that enuf my mix tapes my CDs my Motown recording studios my Bird my Prince my Prince my Prince or my Pryor or my long ass dick or my sweet pussy poppin’ quit daydreaming you fuck about all the shit you can’t have which continues to include my arms, Bernie Mac, Frida Kahlo, a fat ass, James Baldwin & the word “twerk.” sheeyt. imma be here until a good age to die talkin bout all the shit of mine ain’t yours. but fuck it. im brown & distinct. laid out in the sun. only getting more black. with your green in my bag. & your blood in my blood.

you look good in green

Dream about you throwing
me out of the window.

There are flowers,
we are twin brothers.

Bodies transparent,
looking for the moon

In the same place it was when I fell asleep.
We forget to keep the windows open

and I hear you in the kitchen,
asking nothing of me.

Informal existential crisis,
deer on my front lawn.

Hand slapped to floorboard,
big soft red flowers falling.

Clothes to wash,
knives on dinner plates.

Mutts asleep in driveways.
The vines growing into my skin

will leave green scars,
you’ll rip them from my back

and plant them in our yard.
Head down in the shower,

Water into,
window falling out.