making seven figure bank accounts do somersaults, no sweat

  it’s rolling in so fast for crack—(“& it ain’t nothing

  but a hole in the wall”) for homeboys

  cash ’n carry, cold 16 year olds

  who can’t count nothing but greenbacks

  sliding off the screen & roll they helicopter

  after dipping & rolling down the middle

  high up above the paint, their footprints walking on space

  up over your face hang-gliding to the basket like praying mantises

  so fresh they make poot butts faint slamming

  faster than high fiving glory—

  180 degrees of schoolboy legends, saints

  unfolding in prime time memory

  so roll it back, kojak, before magic’s knees go permanently

  south for the winter & leave air jordan footprints

  in yo face game as the baddest one in town

  before they change up the shake & bake jam off the sky again with a new

  phenom, double clutching up there in space like a ferrari stretching out

  flat out burning up german autobahns, changing up the guard quicker

  than fear brings down doodoo

  but hey, young bro, flash the dice roll back through shit

  to when the big O was jack knifing through all them bodies

  out on the court, to when goose tatum was shimmying magic

  down in the middle, down in the paint

  as roy haynes jitterbugged like a magician

  hoola hoopin’ the ball around him, before fast forwarding to dr. j

   —Julius Erving!

  & did we ever think we’d lose these hoodoo gods

  to old age homes for roundball royalty

  new age homeboys not even knowing who they are

  & do they even know about jonestown, all them

  bloated bodies cracking beneath the sun

  & did they ever hear about the north carolina

  astronaut david skywalking thompson

  jamming out in the open off the fly

  helicoptering to roundball heaven

  off the motherfucking coast to coast

  before he took the fall for all that shit

  he snorted up his nose, before hitting the pipe

  that took him right on out like a blown lightbulb

  way back before kenny anderson was even

  a glint in his parents’ pick ’n roll eyes

  before he skateboarded off the juju fake

  picked up his dribble, like magic

  than rose up in space like hallelujah 4th of july

  glory, before dropping a deuce or a trey quick

  as a pickpocket off the slide by

  sleight of hand trick, eased on by like mojo with his yoyo

  pitter patter, now you see me, now you don’t, yo bro

  whodunit, poor guy got caught in kenny’s school yard

  voodoo, jump back in the alley

  say what? did you see that motherfucking bad-boy sky?

  past where it all started somewhere back before

  language followed the north star boogaloo

  dancing back when they was hamboning the black

  bottom for fun, back then in the language

  when homeboys picked cotton

  played the dozens; “eye hate to talk about yo mama

  she was a good old soul, but she got a two-ton pussy

  & an iron ass hole, & yo daddy got a dick

  big as a motherfucking toothpick!”

  say what chu say, say what chu say? say what?

  word, when we knew ourselves through songs

  through what we saw alive in homeboys eyes

  through love, through what it was we were before

  commercials told us how to move & groove, who to love

  when we did it all & had fun & knew the heroes

  new & old & never confused dope for the bomb

  back before we fast forwarded to integration

  entered the 60s on a bullshit tip

  lost ourselves in the fast forwarding

  70s & 80s in the cloning xerox machines

  before kenny anderson skateboarded

  his prince of a hip hop, roundball game

  breakrapping all the way to roundball legend

  up north, south of the voodoo connection

  north of where we entered from africa

  from

  AVALANCHE

  THE SOUND, BREAKING AWAY

  finger touching breeze there gentle in air   almost silent

  save voices of birds   winging in midair banking

  down & over mountains

  when suddenly there is

  movement in the craning upwards of necks of animals

  startled glances pop fear around & around

  suddenly

  above it all is the beginning of a sound

  crip crip carip crip

  crip crip carip crip

  crip crip carip crip crip carip crack crack carip

  crack

  the sound in crevices under rock high up in the mountains

  the sound now in the air is of a pulling away

  a crack in the plate of rock breaking

  caaa-rack crack caaa-rack

     crack crack caaa-rack crack

             caaa-rack

  the assonance of sound breaking from ground

  breaking away from itself & is found in the bounding syllables of snow

  moving now   beginning to roar above the cracking

     separation

   crack crack caaa-racking rocks breaking

  away from themselves a movement as if raising rock

  hands skyward in prayer toward the creator

  & is a breaking away of syllables a breaking & tumbling & shattering

    language flaking

  off verbs shaking off original meaning & swirling in a white storm

    of words that resemble

  snowflakes roaring down a mountain

  of words mounting other words creating their own wind

  storms of flatted fifths & drumrolls snarling down & around & around

  & the maelstrom is a piranha of sound eating up ears with verbs

  sounds building into a blizzard of metaphors spread round & around

  as eyes spread wide in disbelief as words rain down

  in hurricane   fury up inside a giant snowball of verbs

  rocks & severed arms & tree limbs

  pinwheeling & roiling in a boiling white statement of adjectives & nouns

  & the verbs voom vooming galoom galoom voodun galoom

  galoom voom vooming galoom galoom galoom doom doom

  & then it’s over suddenly as it began

  only clouds of white words swirl around the new eddying

  white doves swirling up in cold air

  as if they were white lace floating skyward torn off wedding dresses

  cold as snow crystals here the air prickling

  the once shattering roar quiet

  now above the whispering

  wind

  & the birds mute witnesses gliding in to view

  as new life settles after verbs blew

  the color of snow as metaphor through this poem—

  the theme of renewal evoked—

  as winter becomes spring becomes

  summer becomes autumn

  becomes ad infinitum

  in continuous cycles of seeding

  growing & mending

  breaking away everywhere

  as avalanches of sound

  & words create new language

  everywhere

  I.

  WATCH OUT FOR SOUND BITES & SPIN DOCTORS

  the silliness of it all rushing like cartoons into black holes drilled

  inside our heads & once there became instant throwaway images

  wrapped in plastic, like our hunger for fast foods & zippered smiles

  glued to faces blow-dried hair politicians wear decked out in shiny

  suits everywhere, their hands all wet & clammy with bile

  greed & indifference, spinning their sordid messages through sound bites

  as they puppet doll-dance through sold air all strung-up flashing snake eyes

  pulsating images of bulging gold nuggets watch out as they bore openings

  into our heads, pore themselves sporting wire-attached halos

  the wind all funky hot around them, as television cameras—hand operated

  from shoulders of men scurrying around like roaches apprehended

  in broad daylight—glint their bug-like-roving glass eyeballs, shadow stealing

  everyone around them on cellulose strips of emulsion, better watch out

  when floodlights glance off electric teeth of senators, mayors, or anybody else

  wired for sound, in this moment when the cameras spin frenzy around

  their shutters opening & closing like mouths of beached fish

  gulping for air (so dance, now, you odd figments created by our own

  imaginations, dance when the spin doctors of print & celluloid start waving their batons,

  orchestrating you—& me—like some cold-blooded conductor

  director of the slant & angle of this well-rehearsed, scripted & staged photo

  opportunity, grin & wave a hand, kiss some motherless child on the cheek,

  wear all kinds of silly caps & hats, but always grin & skin some scheme

  we all will see and hear later on, & after the rush dies down, you sap

  gushing, silly rhetoric, cheap, invented image wrapped in plastic

  throwaway grins some spin doctor taught you always to wear)

  so we’d better watch out, better learn to click off these fuzzy blinking

  blizzard-snow screens blocking out the dreams we will never imagine again

  rolling through these moments of sound bites & spin doctors—as we do—

  waving batons that control our lives through manipulation

  of zippered grins in suits spouting linguistic novocaine that disappears

  like thruway images sucked down black holes of fastfood brains

  A RESPONSE TO ALL YOU “ANGRY WHITE MALES”

  eye mean please, already, give me a break, can we agree to disagree

  about who stole all them greenbacks from all them s & l’s,

  owns all the major corporations in red white & blue america, who

  closed all those military bases,

  fired all you “angry white males” in the first place, who

  was it, some out-of-work black jigaboo, some poor illegal immigrant,

  who stole what job from who, or was it your good-old-boy neighbor who

  looks just like you that broke your balls—no foolin?—& calls himself buddy

  tell me, who runs all the big banks & movie studios in this country, who

  owns all the powerful daily newspapers, writes most of the major stories,

  shoots us with all this song & dance rapid fire over god’s airwaves

  who sits on benches in judgment of everybody, who

  brings most of the dope that destroys our children

  into this country, who planted the hatred in the kkk, the white aryan nation

  in the first place, who sent all those jews to ovens back in world war two,

  who wins the title hands down for being the champion serial killer

  on the planet, who lynched all those black & american indian people

  just because they could, who’s polluting & destroying the ecology of the planet

  just for money & property, who wiped out all those american plains indians,

  gave them all those doctored-up blankets laced with disease

  who bloomed a mushroom cloud over nagasaki & hiroshima, who

  unleased aids in central africa & gave us tarzan as king of the jungle,

  like elvis got to be “king of rock ‘n’ roll” after he chained all those black

  blues singers to his voice, who complains all the time about this or that

  about not getting a fair shake if things don’t go their way,

  like petulant two-year-olds with their mouths stuck out in a pout,

  wearing some cheapo rug toupee on their shiny, bald pates, who do

  you do, white boys, that’s who, eye mean, is it anybody’s fault you can’t sky

  walk like mj through space, what do you want, for christ’s sake, everything

  you done created, all the test-tube heroes as white boys in the first place—

  batman, superman, spiderman, john wayne, indiana jones—

  inside your media laboratories

  eye mean, whose fault is it you don’t believe you’ve got any flesh-

  &-blood “real” live heroes anymore—do tell, shut my mouth wide open–

  walking on the planet, eye mean, is that my fault, too

  what’s the problem here, when you can go right out & make a hero up,

  invent all the ones you like with a flick of the tv teleprompter, movie camera

  switch &, voilà,

  there you are, all of a sudden you’ve got a short sylvester

  stallone invented bigger to idolize & immortalize forever

  as “rocky” through “tricknology”—which elijah muhammad told us once

  was your game—who beats up on any man twice his size that comes along,

  but especially large black men, when everybody & their mama knows

  white men haven’t had a real great boxing champion for years,

  & you talking about being disadvantaged in everything

  because of affirmative action, which you’ve had all along in the first place,

  talking about some myth of a level playing field that’s been tilted now

  to favor me when everyone & their mama knows

  it’s been tilted all along to favor you, anyhow,

  go tell that simple-simon bullshit to someone else

  “eenie meanie miney moe, catch a nigga by his toe, if he hollers let him go, eenie meanie miney mo”

  eye mean, please, gimme a break, already

  eye can’t take too much more of this bullshit

  eye mean

  who bankrupted orange county, passed proposition thirteen—

  now all you guys don’t speak at once answering these tough, complicated

  questions, please, take your time, get it right—who invented computers

  creating all the paper-pushing service empires

  that put all you rust-belt blue-collar “angry white male” workers—

  & black & brown & yellow & red & female workers too—out of work

  in the first place, though “those people” are not entitled to anger

  because they don’t count in america these days

  now let’s see, was it “eenie meanie miney moe”

  who let the genie out of his bottle so he could grow some more into, say

  a jigaboo-niggra-scalawag, who took the whole nine yards & everything else

  that wasn’t tied down, maybe it was some indian chief, sioux perhaps,

  some ghost returned from the grave disguised as sitting bull,

  or a ching-chong-slick-charlie-chan chinaman

  & his nefarious gang of thieves, maybe a mexican “wetback” perhaps,

  or some inscrutable slant-eyed japanese kamikaze businessman

  who took away all your sweat, all your life’s savings, but it wasn’t buddy,

  no, it couldn’t have been buddy, your next-door neighbor,

  who looks just like you, & is you,

     could it

  was it–eye mean, who lied about just about everything imaginable

  in this century, & before this century, anyway, back in time to whenever,

  christopher columbus lied about discovering america—he didn’t

  because you can’t discover anything that was already here

  & accounted for in the first place—so please, get serious

  for once, give me a break, will ya, just cool it, lighten up

  don’t be so uptight, go out & get yourselves a good lay, grow up

  the world isn’t going to continue to be your own private

  oyster bed for only you to feed on anymore, you two-year-old

  spoiled brat

  get a move on, “straighten up & fly right”

  stop all your goddam complaining & whining

  just shut the fuck up, will ya

  just shut the fuck up

  EYE CHANGE DREAMS

  for Joe Overstreet, Corrine Jennings & George Lewis

  eye change dreams at 42nd street, times square

  as swirling people wearing technicolor attitudes speed

  through packed days, carrying speech that machine-guns out

  in rhythms equaling movement of averted stares

  squares even sashay by quick in flip

  mimicking motions, as slick street hustlers roll their eyes around

  like marbles searching for hits, lick their chops after clicking in onto

  some slow-witted hicks dribbling spit down their lips

  eating hot dogs paid with fifty-dollar bills

  in broad daylight—

  yeah, tell me about it, trick

  escalator sidewalks moving everything along

  so swiftly everyone thinks it’s their own feet carrying

    their bodies, grooving to a different song

   than say, in gloster, mississippi,

  where time is a turtle moving after a flood has crawled back

  into the space it came out of in the first place

  hear no beepers here

  in gloster, no portable telephones panicking anywhere

  only the constant slow humming glide of bloated mosquitos

  as they slide through air & bank in for fresh blood-kills

     wind-tongue guiding them into the target

  wobbling on their zigzag ride above bearded

  irises waving sword shaped leaves in the breeze

  as if preparing to do righteous battle with anyone or something

  like people living in the big apple (their game faces constantly in place—

  & they even wear them into bathrooms, so scared to death they are

  of running into some cold-blooded rat there

  staking out their own notion of territorial space)

  try keeping their fluctuating dreams up to speed

  switching up each & every moment, in midtown manhattan

    manic chameleons