Ainsley Burrows, Black Boy

[σα(ρε)μαλι]

Black Boy

 Hes a street corner
A stoop
A blindfolded blunt
A nuclear bomb
In the middle of Brooklyn
A thunderclap in the womb of death
A black boy
A tranquilized metaphor
The twice ghettoed
Shackled to the midnight
In his hands
Shooting hoops
Shooting off at the mouth
Middle passage in his cornrows
Maps back to the interior
Back to shango
Back to the spirits
Babbling spitting
Multidimensional black boys
Cotton seeds tobacco shed
Apartheid jim crow
Church boy field hands
Crossover like time travel
In slave ship tenements
Hes a fifth of vodka
The black requiem
Lost in fragments of its own genius
Hes government cheese and divinity
Foodstamps and infinity
Immune to the cyanide
In the quarter water
The heat translates these dark boys
Into small songs
Into a canvas of spilled insanity
Into the chaos trapped
In a stars heartbeat
This conjured oblivion
This resistance
Among the dark boys
With their scrawny arms
The sagging pants
Scarlet eyes squeezed tight by cannabis
The perfume of wasted years
In his collar bone
And hes addicted
To street corners and malt liquor
Addicted
To the taste of his forefathers sweat
In the tobacco leaves
All that henessey dreaming beneath his tongue
Next to the razor
Next to the history
Of ancestors planted
Below wallstreet the memories
Of a father hes never seen
And he wants to go places
So hes writing his name
On everything that moves
Penned his greatest verse
On the window of a train
watched it slide off into
The killing twilight
it said: dear world what have I done
for you to hate me so
Hes a black buffalo
Walking backwards
Through the wheat
Survivor of a million nused
Philosophies
Africa choked from his acoustics
A dying world on his face
Poplar splints
From sea to shining blindness
He was born invisible
With a a tornado smile
Sit still black boy
Keep calm black boy
Dont move black boy
And shango cant save him
From these men who pray to the turbine
And the jet engine
To their cell phone
And their murdered minks
But he doesnt care
Because
Hes a street corner, a stoop
A blindfolded blunt
A nuclear bomb
In the middle of Brooklyn
A thunderclap in the womb of death
A black boy
A tranquilized metaphor
The twice ghettoed
Shackled to the midnight
In his hands


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B9K0up29ds