Table of Contents
Preface 7
Searchin’ for Psychedelica 8
Creation 11
Definition 12
Love Is Life 13
Magic Pen 14
Ghetto Issues 15
Nasty (Three Way) 17
When You Ain’t Got no Money 21
Choice…? 23
Dark Room Thoughts 25
Science 26
Brief Moments 28
Mississippi Like… 29
Manifestation 33
Premature: The Anti-Climax 35
Tangible Documentation 36
The Hug 37
Ghetto Psychedelica 39
Come On 40
Just a Thought of You 41
The Workout 42
Oh, How like God We Are? 44
Root Beer Floats and Chicken Wings 46
All Is never Lost 47
If 48
Psychedelic 50
Seasons I and II 52
Natural 56
Memory Child 58
Café-Chicken Grease Ass Nigga 59
Schizophrenic Tendencies 60
Poetry Affliction 62
When Was the Last Time You Were Properly Kissed? 64
Cool Ranch Doritos/Peanut Butter and Jelly 66
Letter to God 67
Something Strange 68
Thinking 69
Psychedelica 70
To Get Wild on the Nile 71
On the Eve of Suicide 72
For the Enlightened One 73
History Lesson 75
The Wait 78
[i] Will not Pimp Poetry 80
Until [i] See You Smile Again 82
You Still Stimulate my Nasty 83
Time Going 86
Life Is a Parade 88
Pre-Colonial 89
Psychedelic World 91
My Journey 93
Searchin’ for Psychedelica
[i]’m Searchin’ for Psychedelica, constantly settling for
ghetto fabulous delusion hoping to find transcendentalization
like it’s a Lexus Coupe or a Quick Pick Lotto.
But [i] can’t find the Dawn ‘cause [i] spend my time
working from morning dark to night dark as heavy reading
is checking my pay stubs and the second notices of my bills.
Scholarly deduction, critical thinking, and problem solving
are reduced to solving the reoccurring problem of paying
a mountain worth of bills with a molehill worth of wages, forgetting that
only Jesus can feed a family of four hundred with a two piece and a biscuit.
Still, [i] need an award from the prize patrol
‘cause like a magician [i] come up with a way
to pull a fat rabbit from a thin hat.
But, ain’t no Nobel Prize for surviving poverty.
[i]’m a philosopher ‘cause [i]’m a poet-[i] mean
[i] think about “it” and how “it” and its “it-ness” affects me,
signifying the somethingness of our lives.
With words [i] order the universe like a minor god,
defining what’s significant enough to record in bound leaves.
But, my edited, cut and paste, language and
after-thought issues illuminate me as an invisible poet
with an imaginary audience.
The light bill towers like a fanged Oak tree
over the simple shrubbery of going to the moon.
Eating cheap pork today is a necessity;
having a heart attack is an afterthought for tomorrow.
Pragmatism is not a theory; it’s a Religion for the defeated.
[i] don’t know any stainless steel truth, any bullet-proof
knowledge, or any gods with a capital (G).
[i]’m hoping that all of my truths are interchangeable parts that fit
the engine of any situation because all of my knowledge exist
in the half read Cliff Notes of daily survival, and any other knowledge
is excess, like the left-over parts from an assembly project that never seems
to work properly, or like the student who proudly protests,
“If it ain’t on the test don’t teach it to me,” never understanding
that missing knowledge is the missing link in the chain back to God.
Of course, all of my gods are
what help me make it through the night.
When Jesus fed the multitudes, we didn’t listen.
A hungry child doesn’t care ‘bout no isosceles triangle,
and he ain’t trying to conjugate no verbs either.
The rumbled, painful growl of a deserted stomach
is infinitely more powerful than the need to
understand subject-verb agreement or
place poets into proper time frames.
Morals are for those who can afford them,
and [i] have insufficient funds in my account.
[i]’m spiritually bankrupt.
That’s why [i] take another hit, still looking for God,
hoping on smoke that my street corner prescription
will allow me to see His face.
My left brain and right brain are speaking
but haven’t spoken to each other in years.
For art has been reduced to rolling a seven,
number of units sold, and who gets the panties.
Searchin’ for God, settling for sex, can’t see the Lamb’s light
through the germination of cataracts created by the mucus
of day-to-day surviving covering my eyes.
Singing the hymn of C. Liegh, which is often a serous supposition of suicide. This is my revelation,
being another blues, [i] mean psalm, for David.
Still waiting on that sexual salvation, testify (mind if [i]?)
with my Cadillac and four bedroom crib, [i] think that
[i]’ve finally placed inner peace firmly in my front pocket
until the end of the month comes,
slicing a hole and pouring out my peace like running sand.
Then, once again, [i]’m praying, sending letters from Hell
post-marked by Armageddon because my third eye has been poked out
by the middle finger of all the philosophy that [i]’ve memorized.
Now, [i]’m too philosophical for God, or am [i] just phil-lots-a-silly,
measuring my evolution by how many toys [i] have?
As literature falls on wax ears, stone hearts, and brains absent of minds,
we are reduced to robotic beings with predictable software
that crashes whenever we are forced to think;
so holy that we can’t bear to hear profane language,
but can turn a blind eye to a little black child living a profane existence.
We no longer know God because
Nature has been cashed in for asphalt progress.
[i] needs to get high y’all, but Jesus don’t come in a dime bag.
[i]’ve lost Heru’s pager number, and [i] can’t answer Ali’s call
because [i]’ve got to go see the downtown devils and
do my degrading dance to earn my unemployment check.
And somewhere along the journey Confucius and Buddha
have been downsized and merged in the hostile take over
of my permed out, Westernized mind.
[i] need a hit of some pure, uncut knowledge, but my
fried chicken and pork infested psyche can’t take
the real Funk (the one-the middle c) of the universe.
My brain needs an enema
‘cause it’s constipated on capitalism.
That’s why [i] can’t see God when [i] look at you.
In the cracked mirrors of my mind’s cloudy eye
[i]’m a carnival show perversion, and anyone who looks like me
has to be standing on this stage of schizophrenia right next to me.
So, God couldn’t possibly reflect like me,
couldn’t possibly bleed for me.
So instead of repairing the old rusted pipes, cracked inner walls,
and clanging heater of my decaying temple,
[i] put another coat of paint on the outside and lie to the mirror of my soul.
There is an invisible glass ceiling just above
Baldwin’s Mountain, and from below we can hear
the echo of “Sonny’s Blues” as it rattles in the
translucent iron box around my brain.
[i]’ll continue to be a slave in Plato’s cave,
until [i] realize that utopia is bathing in the bright, Black
rainbow light of the spaces liberated by Lazarus’ corpse.
By the way…what’s in yo’ joint?
Mississippi Like…
What is it to be Mississippi?
Where Capitol Streets cross cotton fields
and Margaret’s Jubilee jams with Eudora’s Festival
even when there are college cuts, controversy, and the Klan,
with plenty of revolution, religion, red, ripe tomatoes, and rebel’s ruby racist rag; this is all my Mississippi.
It’s little boys puttin’ dirt in abandoned tires
then rolling the tires by little girls in their Sunday dresses.
It’s hangin’ out at Big Sam’s Juke Joint on Saturday night
and jukin’ to “Sign Me Up” on Sunday Morning.
It’s pickin’ wild berries and stealin’ plumbs.
It’s mowin’ everybody’s yard ‘cause yo’ mama said so.
It’s where time out means…
mama takin’ a break from whippin’ yo’ leathery hide,
and the thought of a swarming strap still causes you
to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
It’s Ross Barnett damming the doorway of education
and James Meredith bulldozing over his ideology.
It’s the Sovereignty Commission playing
hide-n-go-seek with the lives of invisible citizens
while Ebony voices declare “We Shall not Be Moved”
under the salacious sites of riffles and German Shepherds.
What is it to be Mississippi?
It’s no matter how high brow we get
we still have hot sauce on the table when we eat.
It’s having a special jaw bone from being double-voiced,
being bi-legally lingual enough to talk with two tongues:
a democrat on tv and a dixiecrat under the hill-
wearing black suits in the day
and white sheets during the night.
It’s cinnamon and coffee leaves hangin’ from faded
olive trees, a warm Thanksgiving and a cool Christmas,
where rain takes the place of snow,
and a brief frost can close school
like the notion of the ending of segregation,
as Southern Apartheid is kept alive every Sunday morning.
We still don’t pray together even though our children
can go to Ole Miss and play together.
What is it to be Mississippi?
It’s the peanut butter and jelly sandwich
of Archie Manning and Walter Payton
where some like peanut better more than jelly.
It’s the quiet confusion that becomes too cantankerous to ignore--
like when the doctor says today is the day to stop eating pork.
Or, when the pork politics of “good ole boy” kick backs
become too fattening to nurture democracy.
What is it to be Mississippi?
It’s having one street with two names so that
the white folks can live on Hanging Moss
and the Black folks can live on West Street
until the Black folks march up the street
‘causin’ the Confederates to retreat to Rankin County.
What is it to be Mississippi?
It’s being the mirror of the world with a
Chrysler chrome reflection too bright to face.
Someone said to be Mississippi is to be dumb and stupid.
If that’s being Mississippi, then [i] wanna be dumb and stupid:
dumb and stupid like Medgar Evers and Richard Wright
dumb and stupid like Margaret Walker Alexander
dumb and stupid like Etheridge Knight and Robin Roberts
dumb and stupid like Robert Johnson and B. B. King
dumb and stupid like Charlie Pride:
who put on white face with false camouflage
to sell millions of plastic dreams to pale listeners.
dumb and stupid like Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty:
two silver knights who believed that souls could be saved
with secular bibles laced with gospels of the South.
dumb and stupid like Elvis Presley:
who took the juke joint of the ebony Delta to pallid patrons,
liberating them one hip thrust at a time.
dumb and stupid like Bennie Thompson and Aaron Henry
dumb and stupid like Charles Tisdale and Mike Espy
dumb and stupid like Jake Ayers and Hollis Watkins
dumb and stupid like Bob Moses and Alvin Chambliss
dumb and stupid like Gene “Jughead” Young and my
father: who paid my college tuition with jail-time currency.
dumb and stupid like Fannie Lou Hamer and J. R. Lynch
dumb and stupid like Henry Kirksy and Roy McCory
dumb and stupid like Dr. John A. Peoples:
who with a gardener’s love cultivated JSC into JSU,
creating Mighty Magnolias of Mississippi’s Modern HBCU.
But to be dumb and stupid,
you gots to have some Mississippi in ya’.
Like, when you say yes ma’am and no ma’am because manners
are the concrete foundation of civilization,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When you open the door for a woman,
not as a prelude to a rendezvous,
but because women are the fertile soil of our futures,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When a family reunion is a Sunday dinner,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
Or, when you send a plate over to Ms. Mary’s house ‘cause
all of her children took the exodus train North,
and she can’t navigate the stairs like she used to,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When you go to school, because education is the sledge hammer
to knock holes in the walls of injustice and oppression,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When you vote,
even though there are two flap-jack politicians on both sides of the ballot,
and the concept of Statesman is nothing more than a mascot for Delta State,
yet you pull the lever anyway because
Medgar’s blood is the only registration card you need,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When being baptized in the blood refers to the plasma of Jesus
and the crimson of the Civil Rights Movement,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When you speak to people whom you don’t know
as you pass them on the streets,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
And then after speakin’ you ask them,
“Who yo’ folks baby?”
That’s the Mississippi in ya’.
Or, when you see a stranger with a familiar face and ask him
if he’s Ms. Ruthie Mae Johnson’s boy,
who lives over the tracks, under the hill,
that had that daughter who married that Williams boy
whose family owns the stow next to the Saw Mill Inn,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
Or, when you got a whole lot of cousins,
but yo’ mamma and daddy ain’t got no brothers or sisters,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When you stand ‘cause a woman approaches yo’ table,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When you refuse to call a woman
after ten p.m. or anything but her name,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When lovin’ your fellow man as you love yo’self
is your political platform,
and feedin’ little Leroy is your social welfare program,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
When you pay your bills despite them vampire interest rates,
not because you scared of colorless collectors,
but because yo’ granddaddy’s word was as solid as the Earth,
and yo’ daddy’s word is as true as the seasons,
and you don’t want to drive down the value of your family’s name
by being as unreliable as a politician’s promise the day after election,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
And when you do unto others as you would have them do unto you
because it pleases God and yo’ grandmamma,
that’s the Mississippi in ya’.
Life Is a Parade
When everyday is a holyday,
and you cry with a smile,
and a trip around the universe
never exceeds a mile…
When the world is a rainbow quilt
that you wrap around you to smother
the cold breath of disappointment,
this is when your soul eats knowledge
that is as sweet as
chocolate chip cookies and strawberry lemonade
‘cause for you my friend
life has become a parade.