Let my city remember me like I lived there
My slang fit ears like a splinter, so when I speak
I watch my mama’s skin tear.
Kick a rhyme, and it moves like winter air.
My thinnest years were spent in suits that didn't fit me, scared
of dyin like my friends or family or teachers or students.
Grim Reaper might not touch you yet, but he’s mentally abusive.
My eyes were ruins. I cried and shook my shoulders through it.
My girl rubbed the back of my neck--mourning's what I'm used to overdoin.
Smoke polluting my living room, lit a fuse, and the hallway flooded with litter fumes.
Letter from my superintendent. She’s tellin me to quit the booze.
I hope my shouting wasn't the music my neighbors listened to.
Sticky Fingaz in my headphones. My notebook a dead zone.
In high school I was writing "this is the end" poems
on endless loop, brain spinning like the Forgiatos
of an upended coupe. Talk is cheap
unless you’re tellin expensive truths. Stories left in loops
and bunny ears. I was dumping squares on my tennis shoes,
letting loose, cutting clean, touching dreams
that disintegrated in my hands before I could trust them things,
When rain hits the curb right, you can hear the gutter sing.
Submachine under my chest. Blood on my neck.
I did so little for money and so much for respect.
My dough wasn't even crawling when I tried to run up a check
so I take my Ls graciously when I play the dozens with debt.
So broke I hurt in places I didn't think hunger'd infect
Never more than the sum of my flesh. Knuckles indented
punching a message into the sun til it sets.
I coulda been a drunk. For all intents and purposes, I was--and a bet
on who I coulda been was the under, but my lady loved me instead.
The homies loved me to death. My family loved me in spite of
how little I saw them and how much I repressed.
Humming through air--my voice is soundin like it's under a jet.
Messiah gave me the beat, and I gave him my memoirs,
magnums of rosé, a Monet, and a Renoir
though I'm feelin more Magritte or Bearden:
put an image where it shouldn't be, or pull from everything to build a collage of spirits.
And when the metaphors don’t work, all that’s left is the truth.
R.I.P. to the rillos I dropped to their deaths on a stoop.
Shoutout the Delfonics songs I drank my medicine to
Five years ago, my blood was two-hundred-seventy proof
A student died--it was three-eighty. A friend died--four fifty.
A friend died--five hundred. A friend died--six-sixty
My uncle died--seven-hundred. A student died--eight-thirty
A friend died--nine-hundred. A teacher died--nine-twenty.
A teacher died--nine-eighty…
and then my uncle died...and then a student died…
And then my cousin died…