Madness & Poets
(For Marvin X)

All poets are mad Baba.
It’s in the saying of unsayables
the seeing the unseen
mad from murals of mundaneness
masquerading as meaning
we tag truth in acid
with lethal pens we
carve epiphany on the
heaving breast of humanity
hear me: I am
Godz voice,
you see?
Mad.

Crazed with grief
lack of sleep
poems keep knocking
screaming
howling accusations
insisting on justice
or blood
and the terrible knowledge
they may be the same.
Knowing its ill to be well
in insanity
we are religiously mad
listening to the jokes Godz tell
about the planz men make
we invoke open eyes
amongst the blind
literate itinerants
healing wounds
stapled with the gutz of prophetz
whose spines have been
broken open so poems
can be stitched to their
cleaved carcasses.

Poets grow in
the recesses of society's
bowels deep in the
world's shit we
spin beauty in the beast
to soothe the savage
someone should dance now
like poets spin
daring poems to be dervishes.

The trajectory of a poem
spit with accuracy
resembles lyrical alchemy
turning impossible into
the color blue.

I am a poet
long past caring about
disposed scholars who
lie in standard English
we break tense like fences
that separate us from them:
flow oceanic
if you ain’t up on it
long tongue ju ju poets
say soothes
somber inelegant truths
salvaged from graveyards
laureates go hard,
sharp spiters are split
at the larynx hurling
neologisms like clever hexes-
some like sharks
eat the open mic
& spit back
silk stitched caresses.

In words we are invested
& you said
the devil is in the language
so sometimes it be ebonics
we stay hooked on phonics
& known to slam in spanglish
poets float but don’t drift
past tipping points
blaze in smokin joints
bent on makin points
angels dance on pointed tongues
bleeding metaphors
& poetry ain’t the whore
its poets who crush lyric
on temple floors
its poets who commit
commissioned sins
in the name of the mortgage.

Loosely intercoursing textually
he said:
the poems have left
the building
stop texting me,
but I can’t
because words are
like sex to me
I’m mesmerized
by poetry’s ejaculation
I trick without hesitation
love it passionately
ain’t no reservations
even when it dogs me
I’m stuck in the relationship
It’s good
I don’t trip
without poetry’s caress
my wig would slip
I’d blow up not a little
but a lot of shit
poetry is my drug of choice
& my weapon
I keep a full clip
I’m poetry’s bitch
& I’m good with this.

Baba all poets are mad.
On this we can agree
Grand Baba Amiri & you
& like fruit & trees
I guess I be mad too.

Prayer is better than sleep.