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THE NEGRO INSIDE OF ME
Out of the dark
rotating
globe, blue note
and muscular, I work
my scalding body in, and what
a creamy south-mouth
negro
I've become—borrowing
Harlem and
a noose, I am, in my
collardhamhocksweetpotatofever,
in a
Dream—and it's—ecstatic
Jesus!—where in worshipping
that mangled man,
clapping my Sunday gorgeous
in a hat, becoming
His throat, it's where,
in the fervor of a hymn, like
molten honey pouring over it, it is
my sound,
the barbaric splendor of my voice
that driving is the force
of it, it's where
I'm gnarled—bleeding
continuous
on cotton—and, not only
is it the hand that bleeds, that
cannot stop—but the moody
ink
that is its bloody memory—that like
a dull repeating slave, keeps
writing me—that
I'm heavy
with abandonment; that I use
my street-bedraggled life and turn it
mother-fucked messiah
Into rhyme—and do it du-rag,
or with a shaved head
flaring
into afro; that I have
graffiti
boiling out of me
and how I push my burning
finger
into spray—make it
my overwhelming literature—or that it's one from one of many hands—that
I write as Baldwin the expatriate, or Richard Wright; that I am
Cold-eyed in my
scrutiny, have
their curdled genius
in my balls, but hold learning
sometimes, at suspicious
length; that I am
the past that niggered tenements
(I'm shacked up
with a suburb now) that
I'm the sleek of dance, the
music engine
of the world, and funny
coruscating foul-mouth, that I am
shameless and the dark side
of the
Truth—which brings me
red,
to white
and that inevitable
blue—then add
a darker red, add green
and black—ungainly heap! it's all
one new gigantic flag—it has
my fist's uncertain
radical; my talent, my mutilated root,
inside
of it it has me
itchy with sport—light foot
It has, inside
of rough sentences, intuitive, my
surging creativity, dredged up
from streets,
turning my sneaker-pounded brilliance
into style; it makes
me pretty, a sister
whose voice
has sultry sliding into it; makes me
priapic myth. But
how presumptuous—how can I
peer into it, the negro eye,
be dazzled
by teeth, suspend inside a body, be
the airy place it lives in, be
its whirling, or its—trance? For
how can I with zilch
as crystal insight, be anything
but alien to its hard-won
logic, or as a bumbling stranger
or some
digging insect, transgress
the sacred confines, of a life?
Jay Chollick is a frequent featured performer at venues throughout New
York City and its environs. His cycle of poems based on the United
States was published by Soul Fountain in "Five-O: The Stately Poems" in
2001. |