Got Jesus?, and: Plantation Blues

Got Jesus?

is a sign I drive about 80 past on the highway to Tuscaloosa & my most immediate answer is no. A homie told me nobody needs Jesus, that dude just show up sometime & I take that loose gospel to the shooting range the sign is planted on. They shoot at crude outlines of a head shoulder chest with concentric circles smaller & smaller into the arteries deemed kill shots. I don’t know who they are & it’s worse not to see them. I’m deforested & arrested on the border of Quitman & Eden. I mean I sat still. & isn’t it rude a blk writer should employ the verb without police? I mean I swore when I was 18 I would fall in love slow dancing to Raekwon’s Heaven & Hell with worn out Christmas lights netted above our heads. I mean I wanted to know if we shared the same beliefs. Do we bounce, prayer hands wrought inverted on our backs inside a hell scape of wood marrow pews? Or is baptism, for you, a master’s house? You ain’t down to get evaporated? is a question I ask every potential life partner. & off Memory Lane is crucifixion practice with coke bottles & the imaginary body. I don’t got Jesus. I don’t know where his grandmama stay & he seem to rep anybody capable of falling out.

Plantation Blues

last night I was asleep when a white dude climbed in my bed thru a door I had decidedly locked his arms goal posts sanctioned on either side of my head I want you I want you & I know the price of his desire if I say no I’m not speaking if I say no I am a farm yielding soybeans from each corner of my mouth & it’s dull this excursion through our inheritance plantation house blues sounding how it sounds reason why I’d rather feign ignorance to hip-hop in a crowd of new whites suggest a life exclusive to classical music that only bach had bars & I could avoid situations like this knowing whites feel welcome in my bed after conversations on music the connection to black profit renders me property & he hasn’t left yet he has a beard that appears to be swallowing his face & I’ve seen vultures the actual bird & not just the idea of the bird cower over what muscle is left of the land & I’ve seen crowds of birds fly in one direction for weeks thinking this is an event & not a season so unlike the way humans move as if everywhere is heaven & his breath climbs around my face porous & accommodating there is no surprise no chain pull from god to the back of his creation & his obvious intention I’d yawn but I’m asleep & he is so hungry it hurts to watch & I hear a white girl on the other side of my useless door scream doesn’t she know me? doesn’t she know who I am? & I decide I never want to let go of this white man I don’t want I’ll replant him until he gives me something useful & sell his parts by acre I’ve never seen hunger so ugly unnerving all my hinges