NAT TURNER

Originators strike deep.

Inspiration comes in a flood,

cutting down the DNA

of the oppressor.

Violence like a storm

within a storm, fresh

from the cosmos.

A bright Black man of God

had the will, the sacred audacity

in deed.  Articulate in prison,

versed from before his birth

in glorious destiny, wreathed

in grateful angels

from pinioned beginnings

to the full flower of revolution.

Blessed with the lucidity of courage,

seeing from the fields

a vast expanse of stars

that must give light.

Not one is white.

ALPHA'S ALPHA*

Roosters can fly in spirit.

I always knew you had a soul.

Your speckled wings

are spreading now,

your red and gold

filaments trailing

over country roads

and ignoring highways.

Who's that ghost raccoon

following you?  The eye

you took from him

is filled with liquid moonlight,

I can see he is your brother now.

He collapsed in the forest

with a missing testicle.

You roam these astral lands

together toward your own

unknown Valhalla.

Then I wake from lucid dream

and release you to rejoin you

sometime later

in another unsought vision.

* The title was inspired in part by Rafael Alberti's 'The Angel Angel' from his great collection, Concerning the Angels.  That book and The Owl's Insomnia are favorites of mine.  Alberti was one of the greatest poets who ever lived, and his work should be confronted by anyone with a serious interest in poetry.

A glade beside a cliff-drop

a pool of bejeweled women

a burlap umbrella,

corolla'd skull and bones

sweet rain soaking fibers

and the laughter shaking

delicious rows of breasts

bright triangles of sentient pubis.

Faces staring tendrils

through the bleakness

of my former soul

searching me for

milks of ancient dawn

no king's hand

on no willing pawn

free people in a ring

of stone and water

we frolicked making sons and daughters.

ESTUARY OF ASH

Estuary of ash

the hissing kiss of fallen particles

flowing together from formerly

living bodies, wet with blood again

from heaped neglected generations,

filling my ash-stained hands,

mouth crying from my forehead

for my long lost people,

teeth and spine adjoined

in a crawling thing

that can no longer sing.

The flow of deaths

around strong rooted trunks

and trunk-thick roots,

leaves of scalp and hair

landing on reconstituted skull,

making me climb out and

reclaim my throat of throats,

building up the scream of life

lost to so many.

I see my mixed ancestors

pressing a wall of glass that

presents like a bulldozer's blade,

and I want life from shade

beneath disintegration,

let it divide my cells

into teeming darkness,

darkness which has kept the life

unseen in gemlike rectitude

the pale blind sand flows past

the clinging sash of inheritance

to catacombs of damned

whose singing no door has slammed

an unstuck tongue has wrapped

my heart and taken its errant seed

to deeper wombs of home

whose rowers never row alone.

ATTACK OF THE SWAMPMAIDS

Part Two

Swampmaids invade offices

through water and waste,

protected by their amphibious bodies,

shaking off the human sewage with a snarl

as they embark into the cubicles,

injecting psychedelic slime

into corporate computers,

erasing all government files,

poisoning the hearts of heads of state

and sealing their genitals.

Black swampmaids shake fin-clad booty

in ranks atop long conference tables,

dripping radical literature into broken brains,

hypnotizing bosses to walk through

broken windows and smash their skulls

between the painted lines of parking lots.

A few awaken to their torment

and begin to dance along.  They kiss

the foot-fins of the swampmaids

and their veins light up

with swamp psilocybin.

How they long to dissolve

their false identities

in living water.

Now we march together to the swamps

to be fully baptized.  The converts

see the smile on my face: my gills

are beginning to open.

Each opening presents a purple pussy

on my skin.  This is the realm

that dwells in me, not just

the realm that I am dwelling in.

SWAMPMAID ATTACK

The swampmaids slither up

the rainy hills.  They bathe me

in the slime that heals and kills.

It kills the old self that I left behind.

It scuttles that self's last

remaining grime.

They bathe me in the wetness

of their cunts.  We eat the fish

they saved me from their lunch.

We serve the sky's green tendrils

as they climb.  The swampmaids

love it when I dance and rhyme.

They're lighting me on fire

with their talk.  Their anarchy

does not balk where mine balks.

I let them take me further in the dark.

I let them sodomize me in the park.

Their liquid phalluses retract and melt.

They let me melt mine

deep inside themselves.

They open every hole and scream

and scream.  They feel the tadpoles

in my mammal cream.

Our mutant babies soon

will crawl the world.

United states of anarchy

adorn these boys and girls.

The rooted clouds unfurl above

the veins of swampmaid world.

A sheet of water spouts

from a rift in the ground

a living mirror refracts

my inherited cultural self

and scrapes loose the mysterious soul.

I'm drinking through my asshole.

I'm drinking through these

sallow pockmark eyes

from a God-touched Earth

my kind has savaged

with increasingly elaborate error.

Where is the real path to the sky?

It's not through any of their rockets.

The ethereal empties my pockets.

REVOLUTION

Overturn the throne of Christ

in America.  Drive the corporate

capitalists into Hades, leave only

mom and pop shops up and down

each coast, scattered freely

among our humanity.  Tear up

these cruel highways for light rail,

joyous children and bicycles,

communal food-pits and huge

picnic congregations: let us begin

to see one another again.

Bring in the holy heretics

who sacrificed to give us some light,

welcome in our radical elders

without worship to give thanks

for what they sowed, while so

many of us were asleep.

The church we grow together

from this ground

is the church we keep.

No more high elevated priests.

PORTLAND OREGON

Wretched spawn, you need more

suffering.  May your suicide fill the sky.

Your oblivion has become total.

You deserve a hideous death.

Join together in your faint decrepitude.

See how many more abortions

you can cheer for.  Pretend

that your guitars can save the world.

Some Americans prefer their genocide

turned inward: and they think that they

are better than the other kind.

You are the avant garde of nothingness,

and not of art: your hearts are gone

from every clever little thing you do.

PRO NUBIAN ANKH

The snake that was uplifted

is the vein within my form that thrives

the circuits of black anarchism

find it in a mottled hive

my dry bones are resurrected

by the river of blood that's shed

in fearless revolution, constitution

of the streets, of our prophets and our poets,

and the language that they seed

with the fruits of ceaseless struggle

from this shelf life to the next

to the pregnancy of gardens

and their green transcendent end.

PEGGED.

We've already been rimming

each other for about an hour.

Put some sweet vaseline in me.

I'm on all fours, trembling:

my dick is tearing up.

Put on that pretty little pink strap-on,

the one that adorns your female contours

so freakishly and fine.

I'm not ashamed to moan and

beg for it like a girl.  I prefer

to get fucked by a woman.

Let's make sure the strap

gently nudges your swollen clit,

so we can come together.

I can touch myself the way you did

last time I sodomized you.

Please put your dainty little hands

on my hips, stroke my ass

and call me your favorite bitch,

drive it up to the hilt

and pump me good.

I cum so hard that it coats

my whole hand like a milky glove.

Keep it in a minute, let me

praise you and thank you

as I surge in exhaustion.

Gently you withdraw from my asshole

and pat my butt, giving me your compliments

on how gorgeously I took it.

I collapse at your knees,

you pull off the strap

and swipe your wet cunt

with two fingers, sticking

them into my mouth.

I groan with gratitude

and watch as you lick

all the semen from my hand,

smiling.

I think we're married now.

But the ceremony continues:

I can't wait to spread my ass for you again.

ALPHA'S REST

I sit on the concrete block

atop your grave.  I placed it

here to keep your mortal shell

aligned with slow reintegration

into soil, away from scavengers.

Your sisters are alive inside

their pen.  You kept them

safe from harm, and now they live.

I just tossed them some snack seed:

Freckles and Speckles are busy

with it, pecking each particle

from between the little shafts

of sunlit straw.

Little rooster, your bravery lives

in my heart now, and I pray to it

nervously, here beneath

these formidable trees.

Fly with me, little one.  Keep me

company against the tyranny

of my kind.  Roost invisibly

in my ribcage: pluck the poison

from my veins and set me free.

PRACTOPIA*

I brought the buckets

filled with motley grapes.

I brought the albums

shimmering in crates.

Satanism means controlling fire.

Seed and egg survive upon this pyre.

They bomb us and they tear our forms apart:

we gave ourselves already to this art.

Our children know the way that fire feels.

They know the wound collapses time

before that fire heals.

This weal on Earth, we called that civilization.

But in its death we found another nation.

It is a spirit binding us to life.

The strife we feel we don't fear

like a knife.  The harmony we've earned

is hard and real.  Beneath the mask

so borderless and peeled.

The talkers talked but we

made love all night.  We're fucking

to renew our second sight.

Our babies grow and learn

to part the mist.  Their eyes

are angels forming into fists.

*  The title is derived from a talk given by anarchist activist Lorenzo Kom'Boa Ervin entitled 'Those Things that Result in Victories'.  The basic idea is that while utopia is not possible, better life practice is: that revolution and unity in freedom can revive the human spirit towards greatness, if not perfection.  The audacity to link my work with his was inspired by the great Greg Devlin, my mentor and dear friend, who died in 2014 but lives on in his poetry and in all those he inspired.

THE OLIGARCH KILLER

First I'll staple your hands to your desk:

I brought a carpenter's toolbox.

Then I'll fuck your face with a baseball bat,

using nice, long steady strokes.

My hands are already dirty

from all the work you don't do.

Then I'll whack at your elbows

until those arms come apart,

skin sliding like a pair of socks

from thin muscle and bone.

I've already removed the fish

from your very impressive fishtank:

this is a fishnapping.  They are swimming

in a bucket in my truck.  You'll have no

such luck: you're getting dunked, son,

headfirst with all the little that's left of you.

Murder can be sweet, murder can be delicious,

murder can be clean like doing the dishes.

I replace my stapler and leave whistling.

Your feces turn the fishtank brown

from green as we enter the present.

No vacancy remains: you were never a resident.

Deep breath goes through the earth

I won't resist the plunge

of these deep purple ravines

water is seeking my vacant heart

through the channels of an older rain

I call on all the spirits of devotion

who walked a fine ledge

carving all the ruins of the air

into fleshly being

building bones inside their souls

setting them upright in magnetic swamps

and lighting their astral hair on fire.

The grins grow from the charcoal

linking to the glint of black water

and the sent light of dead stars

falling through the bars of heated darkness

growing roots into an engorged sky.

Arrival with black eyes

and gummy veins.

A dark apartment

outside history.

Asbestos breath.  The sinks run

with the blood these trials shed.

A line of stones leads

to a deeper door.

I'm going there

to find my sacred whore.

Jerusalem has changed.

The beast they've caged

can only be deranged.

I pace around my room.

This place they scraped,

it used to be a womb.

I've scraped it too.  I have no right

to ask to be renewed.  But I do.

I found a solid seat

within the clouds.

Stiff angels watched

some demons dancing down.

From above?  This changes

everything to some state

we can never know.

I turn the cockpit

toward the sky and blow.

The ferment of the stars

then comes apart.

I must have kept them

clustered in my heart.