flight, in the first cracked moment of daylight,

  when the moon has slipped back undercover

  & the sun begins to blow out its houngan’s breath

  of fire tempered by distance, calibrated by a man high up

  inside the blue skies of his imagination,

  inside the heat of creation, deep in song, a man who could be

  you, could be me, could be a woman emitting a high sharp cry

  shrill inside a call of divination, worship

  beneath these words a street of boiling tar way down deep

  stretches out now as a track for this poem

  sizzling like a ribbon of asphalt at high noon in phoenix,

  burns flesh like lava flows in hawaii

  in the dog-day’s heat, microwave oven of august,

  where fat earthworms fry crisp to black wing tips on pavement

  where they pause, looking like detached stingers

  of scorpions, replicas of fish-hooking commas arresting words

  inside clauses, shaping the ultimate breath of our sentences,

  speech oscillates here like winking membranes,

  quick as tongues flicking liquid fire down scorched throats,

  lye of incendiary words flaming hot as wind-driven forest fires

  in california, burning leaves dropping from branches

  like faces in nazi ovens, melt from memory,

  like days burned from calendars,

  as the pages of our lives are numbered here

  where we stand up or fall down, ears wagging heads

  full of blues inside the sound musicians spawn

  inside test tubes today, where our speech becomes

  hissing snake tongues

  outside our heads, words flicking fast as popping sparks

  from the snapped off-end of an electrical wire tip,

  after a storm dropped its coiled tail into a pool of charged water

  & is (yes) like a snake’s body (well) shaping itself into an O

  or a cowboy’s rope looping itself (yes) into another O

  like the shape of a dead man’s mouth

  after sucking down or blowing out his last breath

  (well, yes) is like a black hole there

  in space (another O)

  could be an apparition of fakery

  could be an apparition of skullduggery

  could be an apparition of organic metaphysics

  political theater

  could be an apparition of hiccupping drudgery

  could be an demigod of miasmas, holocausts

  could be a holy shaman leading to song

  & is its own particular kind of passageway to language

  filling up the blooming opening of that place

  with its own music, its own kind of mysterious magic, a space,

  a language filled with ambiguities of silence,

  sound buried deep there like light during midnight hours,

  a paradox silence, as in death there is always

  the living breath lurking somewhere in a song

  2.

  sometimes new language is a storm dropping songs

  suddenly from some secret place high up

  inside a swirling system of weather—

  itself an ever-changing code of utterances—

  it communicates the alchemy of nature when it appears

  assembled by God’s mad architects of sound

  it explodes new rhythms out into the open in a whirling,

  cacophony of calamitous syllables

  full of mysterious soundscapes, lightning bolts shattering

  the moment, unzipping dark clouds clothing the sky,

  rips it into veined fissures of an old woman’s legs,

  reveals an elephant trunk of spinning winds howling

  in the half-light as it drops down, it evokes in me

  moaning voices of ancestors thrown overboard

  during the middle passage,

  it is a scaffolding of tongues we hear crisscrossed

  with different rhythms & cadences, meters,

  forms from which newly found structures of poetry are created,

  we hear birthed & sprung into the air there fresh music

  mimicking today’s speech, mirroring thirsty syncopation, sound

  cross-thatched with distinctive cultural DNA seduces voice

  through poetic architectonics of lingua franca,

  architraves of crossbeam sentences lay themselves

  floor by floor, build new structures of language that speak

  to us, intersecting at crossroads everywhere

  3.

  kind of blue in green miles music sings to us

  inside the ether flow, sounds as alphabets blow mean

  solos high above cumuli, a language of silent dreams

  flows through darkness with speed & longing, embraces

  light spreading across a pregnant sky, through cracked lips

  of morning, a voice heard imitating a flute

  where clouds bloom their heads like pop-up ghosts,

  yeast through long segues between black & blue intervals,

  down below, blowflies torch another pregnant pause,

  deepen the space between ahmad jamal & clueless doodoos,

  between “lady day” & test-tube imitators

  the memory chip of voice richness is lost somewhere in between

  the two, replaced by marketing frenzy

  because of cleavage & greed, eye ask what greatness is lost here,

  what should we remember when speaking of imitation

  in the name of song, comparing it to the real thing,

  what made american music great

  was not physical beauty enhanced by breasts bouncing through air,

  not platinum/gold teeth flashing, doo-rags,

  but pure voice/genius making music in blues, jazz, country

  & western, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, rhythm ’n’ blues, bluegrass,

  rap, classical, all beautiful when deep richness is there,

  tradition is innovated deep in the grain, beyond image,

  beyond the cloning sameness of musak,

  is a language communicating with people everywhere

  intersecting at crossroads throughout the world,

  4.

  at 116th street & 7th avenue in harlem,

  english mixes with french & wolof, pops

  like senegalese talking drums, impregnates bootylicious air

  with rap-rhythmic speech scatting out on the streets

  where new voices mack the juba-rattle of flying hands down,

  slap tightly strung skins, mix jambalaya riffs into flow

  caca flow inside rhapsodic rapology,

  clock new inventions scratched across grooved tongues

  spinning & springing from vinyl,

  bodies break-dancing across airwaves like syllables

  track trends coast to coast, cross international boundaries, rap

  new-wave crack language-beats, seduce hearts & cultures

  as architectonic magic fuses clues inside colloquial rhythms,

  harp everyday popular speech, everywhere bringing the news

  as everything is changing in this very moment,

  everything is changing everywhere poetry grows

  word by word, sound by sound, form by form, cadence by cadence,

  mack by mack, wordplays sluicing under the syllables

  stitching evolving language into innovative soundtracks,

  found in the very air we breathe every day

  everywhere, everything is changing

  5.

  each new day begins with the sun rising after night

  swooped down with a black cape full of stars

  & moonlight shining like diamonds left in the afterglow,

  but it all passes, is cyclic, things change again & again

  like poetry, it’s normal the way the world reorders itself

  time & again the highs become lows, systems

  destroy themselves, it is the nature of things,

  when night becomes day moments are viewed, flashed

  in & through a different light

  architectural structures are altered,

  their language full of shifting metaphors in the slinking

  half-light, new rhythms replace old ones,

  music is syncopated with improvisational modes, moto-flows

  push aside goose-stepping syllabic metronomes

  stomping through time & space on white pages, in speech

  when spoken in entombed air it echoes,

  sometimes fractures inside the ear,

  surprise happens every day, different colors mix

  inside speech, a jambalaya-paella fused speech complete

  with fruits of the sea, clacking chickens, stomach sounds

  full of rice & bean palava feijoada gumbo speak,

  it is the natural way to create new cuisine, poetry, music,

  mooing cows, woo-wooing owls, lyrical birds, the winds

  natural syllables rolling from fluted mouths in spring, summer,

  whispered softly as a lyrical caressing breath seductive

  as a lover’s sweet undulating tongue,

  they enter the world, become a new way of hearing/speaking,

  everything changes, the way we hear

  sounds we never heard, never paid attention to,

  everything changes, the way we hear,

  see & know things from different angles,

    everything changes,

    like new architecture rising into the blue

  as glass & steel fingers pointing up to where

  religion swears God is—is the Spirit really there?—

    everything changes,

  it is normal to be afraid of the unknown,

  normal as cracked mirrors throwing back changes our faces see

  every day we look into them as we grow older

    everything changes,

  day changes to night the sun replaces the moon

  it is normal the way our world turns every day

  on its axis like a roulette wheel spinning

  our lives, our fates locked in the luck of the draw,

  the spoke-gears driving the wheels of a speeding car

  losing control on a black highway slick with ice,

  the throw of the dice at a gambling table

  is what this poem seeks to express through voice

  6.

  the pure voice is heard best in solitude, silence, like when

  eye watch a small crab enter a dark hole

  in damp mud in deshaies, guadeloupe, at taino village

  cottages looking over the beach & waves of a blue-green

  caribbean sea, later in the distance gwo ka

  drummers crack night’s stillness with rhythmic genius, machete

  chops of their flying-hands slap tightly drawn skins, track sounds

  seldom heard in america, their voices

  mixing with brilliant orchestral scores of crickets

  improvising with voices of tiny frogs, wind-tongue speaks

  wet with salt off the caribbean as bats dive low through trees,

  the droning threat of a humming dengue mosquito

  can be heard, poised to strike, suck blood from me

  equal to its own weight, but eye smash the threat

  before it becomes real, leaving a mangled

  blood-spot trembling on my skin,

  when day breaks again the miracle of deshaies rises,

  black humming birds stop on a dime in flight

  drink nectar from a flower, their beating wings a blur,

  transcendent choirs of birds serenade in this place

  wondrous as ladera resort between the pitons

  in st. lucia to the south,

  as the sun sets in the west, darkness swoops down again

  an ancient shaman unfurling a black cape of mystery

  full of diamonds we call moon & stars, bats dive

  here again slicing through shadowed latticework of leaves

  like fighter jets, they give off weird shrill cries,

  it is a kind of poetry, a different music

  my ears adjust to listening for its rhythms,

  alert for any surprises bat voices might bring

  7.

  with their music rhythms structure, idioms slip through air

  into fragments of speech in flight throughout the world,

  light up the night inside refracted air,

  organize themselves from improvisation into sentences,

  sluice through our ears like laser beams, musical

  chords & notes chewed off spitting syllables

  shot like bullets from young mouths to explode inside our ears,

  shape breath through songs of griots, the lives of people

  whose voices build block by block from call & response

  antiphonal neologic constructs,

  like sunday morning preacher’s throwing down hoodoo

  architectonic-juju, dna inventions boogalooing,

  shaping the gospel, those churchified hallelujahs, mixing

  boogie-woogie doodoo sounds cruising through street cadences,

  rolling off soothsayer’s blistered tongues,

  as light glances off their platinum/gold teeth—razor blades?—

  like sun rays bouncing off insect-looking mirrored windows squared

  in sleek skyscrapers stabbing through polluted air like stilettos

  throughout mestizo cities of the post-modern globe,

  everywhere this architectonic-juju creates new metaphors

  inside musical sounds blending fresh articulations, mix

  moto-cell phones ringing in bathrooms, showers,

  hang from their own hooks

  voices entering the digital age,

  sashay through a maze of computers,

  download into iPods hip-hopping the globe,

  this poem articulate a language seldom heard

  in the mummified academies filled with tweedy gatekeepers,

  tight-mouthed rejection stretched across their wire-thin lips,

  unable to hear wondrous music

  swelling through the air, unable to dance in celebration,

  their bones refusing all movement,

  unable to recognize any language other than their own

  metallic goose-stepping military rigor, their flat-footed sentences

  straight as lines on ekg screens

  no mellifluous magic, no syncopation, no surprise,

  there, no improvisation,

  but close-minded poetry mirroring ethnophobia,

  decrepit with deep fear

  & claustrophobia replacing light

  8.

  this poem calls for a poetry of openness in america, now,

  where voices skedaddle through time & space,

  signatures riffing, creating on the margins,

  screeching like cats at a cutting session, out on a fence,

  like bird & monk up at minton’s in harlem,

  playing music like they owned it, like mahalia jackson,

  leontyne price, willie nelson, johnny cash, chuck berry, aretha

  franklin, the beatles, los lobos, u2, & bono,

  like voices of whitman, paz, neruda, márquez, hughes,

  walcott, baraka, brooks, ellison, shange, rich, césaire, or cruz

  (riffing on the language we hear in our hearts & ears

  is a new way of hearing & listening)

  the american voice is not white or black, european or asian,

  middle eastern or african, but mestizo, fused with jambalaya

  palava feijoada gumbo, it speaks a musical language

  bewitching our ears with what grows from a collective linguistic

  flow, is a fusion of new syllabic magic rolling off the tongue

  in a mélange of rhythmic sounds,

  like la cucaracha is more syncopated than roach or bug,

  (means the same thing, but is a dancing word

  full of power)—can you say, la cucaracha!

  can you hear power in language flow as beautiful, spiritual,

  the pulse of being in the moment instead of the past,

  on time instead of behind time,

  feeling the breath of wind in your face can last

  as it happens, like music tracking heartbeats pumping

  in your own chest right now is a flow

  9.

  great language is a shower of words inside a blizzard

  of tongues full of rhythms & syllables, is a flow,

  is snowstorms of meaning coming & going everywhere our ears

  turn, hear rainstorms, tornadoes, lightning bolts unzipping clouds

  towering around the calm, savage eye of hurricanes, is a flow

  coming & going, bringing new systems of music,

  new ways of listening connected to hearing,

  structures carrying a host of evolving languages, roiling tongues

  inside cross-fertilized speech of immigrants & new poetry,

  is a flow also located in the evil eye of katrina, rita

  swirling in from the gulf of mexico carrying thunder & death,

  foaming with cataclysmic omens, terrors beyond any understanding,

  categories beyond any knowing what horror will bring

  through cracks of daylight destruction unfolding, rancid bodies

  bloated, floating in toxic water, is a language, is a flow

  we hear but do not know how to recognize

  thirty-foot storm surges speaking in tongues more violent

  than any language we think we hear or know,

  is a flow disjunctive beyond any application of money,

  is perhaps a cosmic spiritual payback

  for bug-eyed children who mirror the language of hunger,

  murder, no sympathy, or empathy for blues people festering

  in a place full of heat, water, mosquitoes, poisonous snakes,

  high prices for gasoline for cars thirsty for petro, is a flow

  of anarchy spreading like a plague in this place, is a form of language

  ignited by category-five winds & angry seawater foaming salt

  & screaming in the voodoo language of the sea goddess, erzulie,

  houngans blowing calamities ashore through their mouths

  of long bamboo horns, is perhaps a payback

  for all the terrors released in this flow

  when coffins, mummified corpses, leering skeletal bones

  unearthed by katrina’s savage flooding tongue

  are scattered like dead leaves & broken branches all over

  louisiana’s devastated countryside, it tracks the fall posthaste

  of america’s once promise of greatness,

  lost here in this macabre jumble of unknown spirits