Ann Arbor

I am tired of walking around.

I walk into conference rooms & coffee shops

hypothetical, like a winged bull

navigating through a night without light bulbs.

I am tired of my loud mouth & my beard &

my male-pattern baldness & my swollen belly.

The smell of jerk chicken drives me to tears.

All I want is to squat under a guava orchard

& shit out snow-covered sidewalks,

& puke out overcast & gray faces.

I am tired of being a black man.

But it would be delightful

to frighten everyone by ascending

to the sky in a red hoodie,

to warmly smile at the people wiping

their Facebooks with my liver.

It would be marvelous to race down State Street

naked, screaming for holy water

until I die of exhaustion.

I don’t want to go on as a noun,

quivering, receding into obscure offices,

growing mold like a wicker doll

in an out-of-the-way bedroom.

I don’t want to go on as a warehouse

of grief & caged birds. I am the reason

hallways are always burning, when I arrive

with my chapped lips & undersized sweaters.

& they guide me into certain cubicles,

into certain lopsided workshops,

into massage parlors that smell like beeswax,

into houses where strange fruit flies out of windows.

There are ejaculating blackbirds & Jenga blocks

scattered inside the houses that hate me.

There are macabre adjectives regurgitated

into crowded living rooms. There are ears

that should have been horrified.

Unsupervised children—everywhere

claws, everywhere stingers.

I stroll along anxiously, over the uncovered mines.

With regret, with unabridged misery, I trudge

past ice cream parlors & PhDs,

past theaters with marquee codes: SELMA BROOKLYN SPOTLIGHT.