Tongue Swallow

This thang do me like

I don’t belong

This thang hang around

Like weather fronts and stall

Above me making it snow

Rain and storm

Making rivers

Lakes and seas rise up and rebel

Against land and everything

And everybody on it

This thang like climate change

Got so many names

We can’t point a finger at it

And identify it well enough

To get help putting it down

Duke Ellington found a name for it

The miasma of the oppressive culture

Is known as Transbluesency

Defined as A blue fog you can almost see through 

We live our lives in that fog

Imamu Amiri Baraka says in Funklore

That’s why our spirit make us the blues

We is ourselves the blues

Fred Moten author of In The Break: The Aesthetics

Of the Black Radical Tradition called it

Resistance of the object

A conscious intention to resist as well as

Unconscious resistance to dominant cultural ways of being

And knowing

Simply because they are values of the oppressive culture

I struggle to reclaim

My tongue and attach it

In my mouth so I can speak

My language

Sometimes I’m too angry to write

But I try everyday

Too often my words won’t dance into

Something that feels like grace

So I suffer with passages

On a page that can’t be shared

I write and recant  

Because I don’t want to leave records

Holding only rage

I don’t want writing that’s too raw

To escape and misrepresent me

I made space to write and now

Time and space betray me

Put out my shingle announcing

My intentions

Now what

Who is this man masquerading as me

Who can’t write his way out of rage

Out of this thang

And an identity crisis

An invisible foot is kicking my butt

And when I turn around there’s only His story

His values

Her domination and none of them are visible

They’ve disappeared behind time

Institutions and traditions

As if they were never there

It used to be I who was out of sight

Now I’m a target for long-range weapons

Unmanned drones

Some drink to forget

Others drink to remember

I drink to lubricate mouth parts

Too dry

Clinched

Jaws too tight