Jesus Died to Guide the Prophet in the Moon’s Blue Chunk: After Mahershala Ali

It was Jesus’s coronet chunk of the tooth. Hurting. It is said, it was soft. Nerves gone dead. They remained ill. Septic. Gangrenous. Weeping. Hurting. Blood vessels gone dead.

Freeing, choice, outsider, and hostility in time. . . .

Momma came with Jesus and saintly mantles

from that other secret place. Churchyards pulping with ghosts. The enslaved. The caged.

Farms. The sea. Diaspora. Where at sea, Blue Black Boy healed Jesus’s Tooth Ache.

  What Atlantic? What America? Patrice Lumumba declares: the art of dead

      — was the invention— of Africa. The Slave. Mud. Goliarda Sapienza

        avows:

not to celebrate her death. With Vultures. Blood. The blessed space of blue angels. Me. Voodoo. There,

    came the gods with smooth pictures. Sunday best!

When others can attack it and kill it. In its fabric. Now freeze. Give me a dose of mud from the Nile. Pictures themselves for relics.

    The pride we lived for long-ago.

Here is where we die in the streets of America. But Momma wants the burial to take place.

For the pride we die, for the saga of white’s violence. White violence is Americanized violence.

    It was born     this way.

        The pride that is cheated by sovereignty. Raided. The street is cold.

Even when we die in the streets of America; Momma wants our corpse to be celebrated in the church. Stripped. Blessed. It is Sunday.

Killed both in the avenues of America and in the Atlantic. Bundling mud for Jesus.

The prophet in the moon’s blue chunk wonders. How to wonder. For the faith of intimacy. Tenderness. Softness. Refined. Fondness. Closeness. Loving. Pleasure and Love. Death and survival. Language. Dialects. Swahili. Wolof. Bambara. & of course, Diola. Imagine cloning Blackness. We come big and robust. Elephant’s skeletons. Lion’s blood. Where we read every white brain. Where we can program it. When to set its default-setting. Where we can mechanize the basic movement of whiteness. Imagine before Officer X fires. We melt his machine. We melt his Americanized machine. In his own fingers. Jesus said. Unpacking the graph of language. Camouflaged in his own nightmares. The American way.

Here is the Okra Garden where Jesus rehearses. Meaning and blessing. Goat’s blood. Jesus’s Tooth. His blue Kaftan. Water. For rubbing. For cleaning. For washing. For dusting. For cleansing. For scrubbing.

But Momma says, we going to church. The village is shut. From Nairobi to Missouri. The prophet came with gifts. He says, in the name of Allah. He masters blue space in the moon. For the day of judgment. But Momma says, she has bestowed our grace. She says, Blackness is the most gracious. She says, she praises the Atlantic. She poured blue dust and chemical Black so white rulers can’t travel in blue waters. Momma says, we are the most merciful. Blue Black Boy came for Bush Boy in bliss. Bliss only. That was all they had. Their command for love and fire. There is a fable in Senegalese culture: that Blue Black Boy is a fable. His arrival is sacred. His arrival must be celebrated. Sunday at church. Friday in the mosque. After the recital, we went to the farm. It was summer and vultures came running. Momma came to protect us from devil. Momma protects us from devil. She says, so I can come home safely. Tenderly. Tenderly in my gracious body. Inside Momma’s home there is blessings. She urges the priest to tell us a fable and history. About the slaves. The bricklayers and the orphans. We are so poor. Eating dirt and mud. Blue Black Boy came to write the prayers. Blue Black Boy came with the economy of faith. His flesh and soul are ziplocked. So, to turn-off whiteness. We break English, French and German. Fanon was right. I mean Fanon was there to turn-off whiteness. Now whiteness in Fanon’s oven rusted beef. But our wisdom mused. Chewed. Grazed. Pondered. Gazed. Eyed. Intended. Predicted. Vigilant. Cautious. June Jordan’s toolbox came in songs for the church. Prayers in them...