Jackson’s moon walk or a Jimi Hendrix or John Coltrane solo,

  breathtaking, and in April 2016, after tearing your Achilles in 2013,

  and tearing your rotator cuff making a two-handed dunk

  in 2015, you announced that the next season would be your last

  and it was, but in your last game in April 2018 at the Staples Center,

  you dropped 60 points, taking 50 shots—like the ball hog you were—

  to get there—but no one cared because it was your last game,

  Kobe, and everyone loved you, hated to see you go

  then you retired as the first player to ever play 20 years wearing

  the same team’s jersey, then you dropped the microphone

  on the floor, saying those now memorable words, “Mamba out!”

  a big smile spread over your face as thunderous applause washed you

  in thunderous adoration, it was an unforgettable night for a forever

  star, and now all that is left is to compare you and your friend

  Lebron James (“Bron-Bron,” also called “King James”) as to

  who is the best after “MJ,” though that too is being hotly disputed

  now amongst many white critics, though as some Black playground

  fans say everyday—“What do those white boys know about this?!”

  7.

  when you retired from the game, the Lakers hung both

  your numbers—24 and 8—from the rafters at Staples Center,

  but you never looked back—didn’t let no grass grow under

  your feet—went down another path, started writing books

  for children and one of them became a short film, winning you

  a golden statue Academy Award in 2018, you stopped

  going to Laker home games until your daughter, Gianna—“Gigi”—

  became a basketball player who wanted to go so she could

  watch, learn from the best, so you, like a father took her and all

  the LA Staple Center fans were happy again to embrace you

  8.

  and so, it was a very terrible way for you to go to the other side,

  terrible to fall from the sky through wet gray day fog in January,

  in Calabasas, California, in 2020, right above the Steeplechase community,

  at 9:45 AM, where you, Kobe Bryant, your 13-year old daughter, Gianna,

  on your way to a tournament featuring Gianna’s team named Mambas

  lost your lives with seven others in a mangled Sikorsky S-76B helicopter

  with the wreckage strewn over a rocky area the size of a football field,

  on a hillside buttressing a small scruffy mountain they found you

  after the flames with your long arms wrapped around Gigi

  trying to protect her from the impact of the unmovable mountain

  what were you thinking, Kobe, as the helicopter kept circling,

  seeming to wander around up there in all those blinding,

  billowing clouds so thick the pilot didn’t know which way was up

  or down, were you talking basketball with Gigi, the other six passengers?

  you once told someone you wanted to be immortal, now, today

  you have ascended to the spiritual realm, Kobe, not only as a legendary

  basketball icon—one of the greatest ever—but also as a human being

  you had learned the gift of sharing with others, growing into a spiritual

  father, on the road to developing even greater things, you changed,

  at the end of your life, you became a better, softer person,

  who smiled easier, didn’t seem so competitive, because—though

  we will never know this, it is only my speculation—your death,

  Gigi’s and the seven others, was truly a great loss for legions

  all over the world who will scream your name as long as the game,

  basketball, is played and eye can hear this chant swelling up and down

  from crowds in arenas as long as hoops are played

  “Kobe, Kobe, Kobe Bryant, Black Mamba” making a house call!

  THINK OF IT

  think of frogs boiling in hot water when

  watching people sweat in hot spaces

  while walking through blow torch streets

  in concrete cities all over the globe

  because head in the sand climate deniers exist

  you might wonder what it is all about

  burning to death while sleeping, or swimming

  in lakes, or oceans where there are no fish

  or making love with windows thrown open

  & hear no singing birds when climaxes come

  causing men & women to scream with joy

  or caught singing somewhere out in a meadow

  trembling, removed from sizzling asphalt & bricks,

  people dozing here in quiet, saccharine moods,

  trees fluttering green heads above, kissing sweet

  wind tongues licking honeyed flesh, lathering

  scorched cheeks—this can be rare because many

  only think of stashing blood money away

  because life is beating hearts—not gizzards—

  it means loving trees, flowers, animals trapped

  in forest fires, tribal people, birds, saving fish

  baking in deep hot lake polluted cauldrons

  filled with skulls, teeth, bones, fingers, arms & legs

  littered over these unreal lunar moonscapes,

  graveyard sea bottoms holding unforgiving

  memories in pits of our human depravity revealed,

  signals no remorse here in empty holes of eye sockets

  looking up into space through clouds of dust

  after volcanic eruptions shook worlds

  when skies clouded over with cinders of ash

  falling stones splashing into lakes race toward

  boats fleeing whirl-pooling waves full of screaming

  survivors, all of this carries unanswered questions—

  is this the reckoning we all must face now,

  when thinking of how our bones will reveal

  themselves in the future, inside texts of history

  books where metaphors are created from bullet holes,

  armies marching to war because of religious faith,

  when the choices are whether to write sentences

  evoking poetry filled with music, love

  dreaded voices of sacred spirits, voodoo priests,

  musicians creating holy rhythms we dance to—

  what are the questions we must raise now, are they

  washed in genius colors from brushstrokes of painters,

  portraits of what our bones will reveal in the future?

  think of them now, those bone chilling questions,

  when you look out across the world, bend your vision

  & look around mountains curving through space,

  with your lens wide open, holding no malice, then

  pray for clarity, dream, hope you see beauty there

  TIME

  time will bring us shining blue

  skies in time blazing up suns

  above us in time moments

  will transform gray clouds to black

  people will rejoice in nights

  with music songs in night clubs

  flight in time will lift sadness

  horror will transform faces

  bring back life with light beneath

  masks wearing beyond carnage

  break out joy and laughter

  be reborn with metaphors

  laced with new tongues in language

  American beyond race

  in time we will breath again

  in that which grows here today

  though rooted in history

  sprouting new tribes of flowers

  in seven throw eleven

  roll of tumbling dice of life

  though here in this slender poem

  only seven syllables

  structure the lines of this poem

  about time and poetry

  SOME THINK

  some think it is the long, short road we travel over,

  people we encounter, what their spirits reveal

  flashed through lens of their eyes—warm, cold, or bright,

  perhaps dull in those of killers searching for victims, though

  whatever is run into by happenstance, or choice

  the destination could be as important as the route taken,

  might be a lodestone—magnet—pulling us to take one step

  after another, as luscious lips of a magnificent woman—

  a beautiful spirit draws us closer to a kiss

  when her sweet breath blooms, perfume, swells,

  lingers on her bonbon tongue, probing, delicious, deep

  in a lover’s mouth, reveals what we think love

  in our libidinous imagination could be, what

  holds us fast in that hot space of slippery seduction,

  takes breath away, is full of pure, enchanting beauty

  like when a journey is breathtaking enough to teach

  in moments that can lead to pure transcendence, is what

  might pull this poem through madness to mango metaphors

  sweet with childhood memories, striking images

  encountered on desolate roads cutting through corn fields,

  & you saw black clouds drop a howling tornado funnel

  that wiped out a small sleeping town somewhere in Kansas,

  out there on the plains with your family, ran into stupid men

  looking to murder just for thrills because you were black,

  so they could lift their heavy balls up out of quicksand—

  do they bust their nuts, pop orgasms doing this,

  watching blood flow like rivers from screaming mouths after

  machete slashes rip red lines across necks, open up floodgates

  so life can enter death slowly, but now eye digress

  because being an old man now, who has watched these same

  scenarios happen so many times before, after looking at beauty

  on a promising day, hoping creativity would flow my way,

  perhaps, soar as eagles do when their wings spread feathers,

  open up, ride the wind slicing through light, become spirits

  we poets wish we could become searching for the right words

  to write in a poem that will speak truthfully of freedom

  in any space, eye am bored with it all now,

  but then there comes this clear, chilling moment

  pulling me back to face the treacheries of earth,

  when some think it’s alright for a man to slaughter

  his stunned wife to death in broad daylight, hacking her

  through blood-curdling screams, in front of their children,

  as a foghorn blows mournfully in the harbor,

  a gray fogbow bends into an arc somewhere over Scotland

  majestic as the silver one shining when there’s sun

  arching above the Mississippi River, fronting my hometown,

  St. Louis, Missouri, that some of us call “sad louis,”

  some think it prophetic watching an “ice finger” of death

  birthing in an underwater cave, a blue hole forming a sinkhole,

  a cat’s eye off the coast of Belize—so what is it we don’t know

  but think we definitely know when it comes to everything

  swilling around our lives ugly every day—

  though we do know this—a dead fish never smells better after

  laid out on a table in the sun seven days later

  & you can take that to the bank from an old man who still thinks

  he is young in his heart, though knows his body is weakening

  as he walks up steep stairs, a hard knot of a “charley horse”

  ambushes him over & over again & again in very real time

  NANCY PELOSI

  what can be said of this petite

  Italian woman from Baltimore,

  who steps up to the plate,

  accepts the big call, backs down to no one,

  a warrior with a very sharp blade

  she knows how to swing

  a modern day Joan of Arc

  down in the cesspool of Washington, DC

  where she’s defeating men

  every single day

  HOMAGE TO ELIJAH EUGENE CUMMINGS

  eye never pressed flesh with you but heard, knew you

  through your booming, prophetic voice, your noble,

  caring heart, saturated with love, forgiveness, a warrior’s

  temperament ready for battle when that was needed,

  so this is a tribute poem for elijah eugene cummings,

  remembered after poet e. e. cummings—kind of—

  though the quiet, booming voice of the politician hailing

  from baltimore via “souse kalinah” was a poetic voice too—

  though not the same as the taciturn, modernist, experimental

  voice from cambridge, massachusetts—yet each of you

  e.e’s. shared a plain spoken, “lyrical directness” that carried

  a sense of playful humor, a kind of metaphysical

  rambunctiousness saturated both of your egalitarian genius

  delivery of language, rooted in the good soil you grew from,

  grounded in a place where prophecy rose through poetry,

  politics, prayer, to do the right thing, the righteous thing

  FOR HUGH

  for Hugh Ramapolo Masekela, 1939–2018

  my dear brother, we once told each other

  we would go to the other side together

  though eye couldn’t imagine how we would do this

  since death has always been an individual act

  the place where rumor has it—though no one,

  spirit or human has ever come back to tell

  the truth of what it’s like to be there with all those

  bones & maggots, so that veracity, that fact, reality test

  is thrown open to doubt, to mystery,

  hearsay, so to speak—& what you have then

  beyond this dilemma is the flat footed question, fact

  that darkness looms forever over us all in skies

  with eyes staring down we believe are ancient stars

  above our beating hearts, waiting, pulsating

  rhythms in sync, that light up the night, as we learn

  or figured out somehow the mystery, creative

  mastery of living in corrupted space

  everyday keeps our heads above the flooding

  waters we swim through disguised as sharks

  so what is it about danger we have come to

  understand, figured out from both our hard

  scrabbled lives drenched in spilled blood of close

  friends & beauty, both reverberating inside our lives,

  was it the truth of music driving us through those

  Frankenstein moments, Dracula miscreants

  who haunted our streets & dreams with evil—for me

  in St. Louis, Missouri, you in Johannesburg, South Africa,

  both cities so different, but so alike in senseless slaughter

  where we grew with wide open eyes serving as radar

  was it the magical, healing power of love

  that so convinced you & me despite cold-blooded

  whacks of “two-by-four” pieces of solid wood

  upside people’s foreheads we knew, when we lost close

  sandlot baseball games for me, soccer for you

  scary in neighborhoods of blood letting, for me in “Sad

  Louis, Missouri, down the street from rock n roll legend,

  Chuck Berry, while you in South Africa was helping

  create & shape music of kwela, penny whistle jive,

  mahtathini, mbaqanga & black american doowop

  with Jonas Gwangwa, Miriam Makeba, Caiphus Semanya

  & so many other great musicians sprouting trees

  down there at the cobra poisonous fang of South Africa

  but then the jazz trumpet, vocalized styling

  of Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie caught your attention,

  then came the prince of darkness’ hip, cool music,

  that turned your head & trumpet licks around

  like a spinning top when you came to new york city

  & met miles himself, who also loved what you were

  playing on your flugel horn, it transformed you

  & now you are a bona fide legend with a musical voice

  shaped into an original instrument of beauty all your own,

  a voice eye hear constantly echoing, threading music

  through my head full of beautiful memories of you

  SPACE TRAVELS

  space travels around the world through wind storms

  licking tongues blowing fiercely over mountaintops,

  air crisscrossing city streets fluting there inside

  sounds, chutes conveying voices of tribes sluicing news

  clashing with other tribes, who have different hues and

  cries because of skin color, though their thoughts might be

  the same song and dance to the same music, speak the same

  language though jitterbugging syllables might seem foreign—

  to you due to the soil your blues rose from—though who

  do you love in the region echoing memory of you

  rooted in recognized drum beats, harmony, songs you heard

  transporting melody inside ears back through time, resonant

  as spheres heard in tears of Miles Davis’ trumpet spears

  stabbing words of poets riffing deep blue notes, sluiced

  through sentences, cascading murmurs, clues unmasking

  metaphors of choo-chooing train whistles, wooing hoodoo

  Black Mississippi gospel, guitar lyrics reverberating,

  infused with electric ghosts throughout Delta shadows,

  who plunge through mysterious, fluttering silk curtains—

  primordial senses—that wave, enveloping around

  enchanting hours after midnight, when haints come out

  and small birds flying with eagles like dots across white—

  or red eyes—of moons stare down like a one-eyed cyclop

  that always bewitches all doubters with questions

  plunging through the mysterious curtain enveloping

  senses, around the bewitching hour of midnight,