Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones):
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
CROW JANE (under construction)
on the Last Poets biography
back to
Snally Gaster's African American Phat Library Experience
Not enough poems here? Email me your favorite works of the masters (no amateurs please).
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
(For Kellie Jones, Born 16 May 1959)
Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelops me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad-edged silly music the win
Makes when I run for the bus...
Things have come to that.
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
Nobody sings anymore.
And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into
Her own clasped hands.
[thanks to LBacall16@aol.com]
The main thing
to be against
is Death!
Everything Else
is a
Chump!
If Elvis Presley/ is
King
Who is James Brown,
God?
I wanted to know my mother when she sat
looking sad across the campus in the late 20's
into the future of the soul, there were black angels
straining above her head, carrying life from our ancesters,
and knowledge, and the strong nigger feeling. She sat
(in that photo in the yearbook I showed Vashti) getting into
new blues, from the old ones, the trips and passions
showered on her by her own. Hypnotizing me, from so far
ago, from that vantage of knowledge passed on to her passed on
to me and all the other black people of our time.
When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to
black people. May they pick me apart and take the
useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave
the bitter bullshit rotten white parts
alone.
"A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will.
Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.
We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.
We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new
Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy,and create. What will be
the sacred word?
OK Shuffles.
Stink in neon
Lie in lights. Betray before millions
Assassinate w/ slogans. Not old toms
but New Toms, Double Toms
A Tom Tom Macoute. Fresh Zombies.
House Nigger maniacs. Oreo serial killers
That thumping, that horrible sound,
is not music, not drums, but shuffling
Not old toms, New Toms, Double Toms
A Tom Tom Macoute. Fresh Zombies.
"Crow Jane, Crow Jane, don't hold
your head so high,
You realize, baby, you got to lay down and die."
--Mississippi Joe Williams
For Crow Jane
Mama Death.
For dawn, wind
off the river. Wind
and light, from
to be continued when I have time...
biography/bibliography
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