8-Track Tape
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The last time I saw you, you were beneath a stack of Martial Arts magazines in a thrift shop on the West Side, so I know pride's an issue. I had Mad Respect for you until you let a nail technician do crosswords and prop feet on you. You've been a paperweight, a refrigerator magnet and a ghetto-weapon, and your web-site says you've gone the snitch route organ-donoring your insides to the FBI. Another audio-dinosaur saw you holding up a weak window, working the jimmy-rigged air conditioning game in an old folks home known for climate and population control. You've been a tombstone, a hall pass at the Sickle Cell clinic and a prop for VH-1. [End Page 899] There you are again, Mr. Integration, outside a memorabilia show in Honky Tonk, Mississippi, in a doctored cardboard cutout with Wolfman Jack and Suzanne Somers, a hard head makes a soft behind. Very Up from Slavery of you. Very " How I Got Ovah". You're just waiting for Hip Hop or some hip academic with an oral fixation for Post War Plastic & Shell Toe Adidas to mythologize your demise. This is your last chance playa, don't play wit' me.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, one of the founders of the Dark Room Collective, is an associate professor of English at Case Western University, where he teaches courses in creative writing and African-American literature. His first volume of poetry, The Maverick Room, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2005. He is also author of the chapbook The Genuine Negro Hero (Kent State University Press, 2001), one of the three poets collected in the anthology, Take Three (Graywolf Press, 1996), and co-editor of On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists (New Cambridge Press, 1994). He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
