Memorial for Othello and Desdemona

As If It Didn’t Have to Be That Way.

        Brother, get real.  Love was never spoken of behind your back.  Everything else was spoken of, but love was only when you were together, two backs, beasts in love, what we all ache for and ache and never speak of.  
Brother, get real.  You talk like them, but don’t call it love.  With you its gotta be something else.
        Brother, you fought their wars and prayed their prayers but in their minds where you felt love, they saw a big swarthy, sabred beast looming over their swords, out thrusting them in their own wedding beds.  
       Brother, you were a moor, and more Christian than them is still a moor.  But you bought it, you tried to wipe it off, wash it off with their Jesus showers.  Borther, didn’t you feel like a clown, like a punk, like a sucker for playing their game?
       You ain’t white.  “The fountain from which my current runs or else dries up: to be discarded thence!”  
       You’re current flows dark, even light dark is still more dark than any Christian.  Moors dont love, they rut.  
       Brother, it was those crackers that did it to you, it was your own cracker aspirations that did it to you, and all she wanted was you.  All she wanted was you brother.  All you wanted was love.  Those crackers played you out, brother, and you did it to yourself, killed what they couldn’t have, what she wanted from you, what she gave to you, what you couldn’t trust.  
      Sister, he can’t hear you.  Sister, you can’t hear him anymore.  Sister, you know how they are.  
      If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else.  They prize their swords and hold you there to prize them as well.  
    Sister, you asked I “How am I false?”  
    Sister, it wasn’t you.  How are you false but in the words of others?  How are you false when all you say is yes!  When you’re wedding bed waits, and you are there showing him Yes!  
    Sister, love doesn’t happen between ewes and goats.  Sister, your father sees you as a lamb.  And how can a lamb want love when love comes with the sword, when your father loves only through his sword?  
    Sister, there isn’t no love unless you got some way to stand up for it.  And even your own voice was helpless.  
    Sister, they always say you’re asking for it.  Somehow, you know they’re going to get what they want.  And sister they just won’t hear Yes! when you say Yes!  They won’t hear No! when you say No!
     You loved a man sister, thats where you got doomed.  “I heard you singing “Let nobody blame him/his scorn I do approve.”
   That was some bullshit sister.  You had no choice.  You had no choice of standing by your self, so you stood by your man.  You stood by your murderer.  You stood by and all you had was your voice and all he had was his hands and all you had together was love.  And they set out to kill your love as soon as they saw it threatened their soft and inadequate swords.  
    Sister, if only that love had been left between you.  Sister, I’m sorry for you.  
    Brother, in the next life go for love first, Sister, claw your way out of that wedding bed and find your love, for yourself, stand by that love, and never submit.  
    Brothers and sisters, love is dead when we silence with our hands, when we choke off the flow between us. 

Poem: Wear Something Silk For Quitting Time

Wear Something Silk For Quitting Time

It was my job in the environmental lab
to pinch rubber tops of glass droppers
and squeeze out drops of of aitch see ell,
and aitch three bee oh three,
into glass bottoms. But they never let me use any of it.

Good god, I still want acid drops for the fabric of society
to eat polygon holes out of that bleached table cloth,
So managers like us can’t point or yank at it for support,
can’t mark it up with explanatory graphs,
and can’t keep us looking at each other
through constitutional veils.

When you gonna let the clothes out of the wardrobe?
Tumnus isn’t hopping to fetch them
to the other side and give them reign over kingdoms
of cgi crowds lifting up the same repeated arm
and smiling like horny slaves up at moth worried uniforms.

Let’s put the guns down and feel the weight of hammers
and make rock dust out of chiseled mannequins,
American Idols, textile facades,  
and infrastructures of finance that enclose us
in dimensions we wear but can't point to.

From everywhere, around the world, we’ll go dancing.
Dressing down cops and bosses, twirling in bell dresses, 
dressing up as each other, and wearing out the unity of
fabric sewn together, by un-thanked fingers padded
with worked to death skin, and sold to be worn by veiled bodies
that sell data entry, words for students, the grip of a broom
and the embroidery of geniuses like us.