1. i'm crazy bout that chile but she gotta go. she don't pay me no mind no mo. guess her mama was right to put her out cuz she couldn't do nothin wid her. but she been mine so long. she been my heart so long now she breakin it wid her bad habits. always runnin like a machine out of control;
All the kids came rumbling down the wood tenement Shaky stairs, sneakers slapping against the worn Tin tread edges, downhall came Pepo, Chino, Cojo, Curly bursting from the door like shells exploding Singing "I'm a Rican Doodle Dandy" and "What shall We be today, Doctors or Junkies, Soldiers or Winos?"
Pepo put a milk crate on a Spanish Harlem johnny pump And drops opened like paratroopers carrying war news.
the day he traveled to my daughter's house
it was june. he cursed me with his morning nod
of anger as he filtered his callous
walk. skip. hop. feet slipshod
from 125th street bars, face curled with odd
reflections. the skin of a father is accented
in the sentence of the unaccented.
After you finish your work after you do your day after you've read your reading after you've written your say – you go down the street to the hot dog stand, one block down and across the way. On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.
I hear the halting footsteps of a lass In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass To bend and barter at desire's call. Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet Go prowling through the night from street to street!
Under the edge of february in hawk of a throat hidden by ravines of sweet oil by temples of switchblades beautiful in its sound of fertility beautiful in its turban of funeral crepe beautiful in its camouflage of grief in its solitude of bruises
1 There are no dry bones here in this valley. The skull of my father grins at the Mississippi moon from the bottom of the Tallahatchie, the bones of my father
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery. The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily. Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust— —I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past— and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
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