Ode To Kanye West In Two Parts, Ending In A Chain Of Mothers Rising From The River

I wake up the morning after another award show and I hear
the calls surging over the mountains again I hear 'em
saying

hey boy
you know we ain't
rupture this country's spine and unearth all its gold for you people to cocoon
your teeth in it
let your mouths spill all over our sacred trophies get fingerprints on the gilded
bark
of crowns
our men earn and set in the fire until they melt down into the bright and flesh of
another woman who will never cup your face
in her hands
and sing into your ear while the certain darkness of night turns chicago to a
muted child
you ain't getting that again 'til heaven calls for your body
after it been tied to a truck in east texas
by another diamond drowned jesus chain
and dragged through that jagged metal holy land so you can meet god clean

open and split
just give us your neck and we will carry you back to the sound
of your
mama's voice

when I say I wanted the boy who cursed my dead mother's name to become a ghost, I mean I wanted the bones of him to rattle on his father's nightstand. I wanted another man to wake up haunted as the men who christened every morning screaming into the shell of whatever buried love still lived in the wood of the only home they could afford and isn't that also another language for grief? there are only so many ways to dream about a corpse before you find new things to call sleep, or a new thing worth closing your eyes for the woman pulling you to the warmth of her living mouth or Nina Simone's voice laid tight and naked over something your boys can rap to until there is enough money to move out the hood and into somewhere not creased with songs of the lifeless. Somewhere with food for everyone, even if it ain't the fish our mothers cooked on Sundays, the smell of it crawling in under our bedroom doors and folding us in its arms. When I say I wanted the boy who cursed my dead mother's name to become a ghost I mean I wanted the bones of uncooked fish to rattle in his throat while everyone he loved watched with their hands pressed underneath their chairs. I think I'm better now. I still watch a couple dance with their smiling children in a park and I want to tell them how easy it is for all of us to wake up next to someone who never will again. I am like you. I still want to feast on the happiest moments of strangers. I don't know what this makes men like us except bound to our loneliness, crawling on our hands and knees again through the southern mud that women we loved once pushed between their black toes, until we reach the river. press our lips to the bank. whisper their names into the delicate brown earth and pray the water parts this time. Every mother we gave over to death, walking from its cool mouth. A wet and thrashing catfish in their arms. They will ask

have you eaten,
child? you closed
your eyes
during another one of my sweet
songs and I thought you would
never
wake