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by Tongo Eisen-Martin
The SF Bay View family is honored to have Tongo Eisen-Martin, educator, movement maker and recently named San Francisco poet laureate, join us for a monthly poetry column and help pave the way for more budding, revolutionary poets. – Nube Brown
All street life to a certain extent starts fair
Sometimes with a spiritual memory even
Predawn soul-clap/ your father dying even
Maybe I’ve pushed the city too far
My sensitivities to landfill districting and
minstrel whistles/ modal gangsterism
White supremacist graffiti on westbound
rail guards
– all overcome and
reauthored
revolutionary violence that chose its own protagonists
or muted stage of genius
The garbage is growing voices
Condensed Marxism
for warrior-depressives
Underpasses in their pockets
Because they just might be deities
or decent bid on the Panther name
A merciful Marxism
Disquieted home life
Or metaphor for relaxing next to a person
Who is relaxing next to a gun
I stare at my father for a few seconds
Then return to my upbringing
Return to the souls of Ohio Black folks
Revolution is damn near pagan at this point
You know what the clown wants? The respect of the ant.
Wants to interpret pain only
wants your old soul to turn young
see ancestors in broad day light
wants to pull a .38 out of a begging bowl
wants me to hurt my hand on this pen
I am not tired of these rooms; just tired of the world that gives them a relativity
My only change of clothes prosecuted
The government has finally learned how to write poems
shoot-outs that briefly align –
that make up a parable
white bodies are paid well, I posit
do white men actually even have leaders?
all white people are white men
A rat pictures a river
Can almost taste the racial divide
Can almost roll a family member’s head into a city hall legislative chamber
Knows who in this good book will fly
all I do is practice, Lord
I have decided not to talk out of anger ever again
Met my wife at the same time I met new audience members for our pain
We passed each other cigarettes and watched cops win
A city gone uniquely linear
Harlem of the West due a true universe
“I will always remember you in fancy clothes,” my wife said
so here I sit… twisting in silk ideation
My rifle made of post-bellum tar
My targets made of an honest language
This San Francisco poetry is how God knows that it is me whining
Writing among the lesser-respected wolves
Lesser-observed militarization
Dixie-less prison bookkeeping/I mean the California gray-coats are coming
lynch mob gossip and bourgeois debt collection
I mean, it’s tempting to change professions mid-poem
in a Chicago briefing, a white sergeant saying, “blank slate for all of us after this Black organizer is dead.”
standard academics toasting two-buck wine at the tank parade
bay of nothing, Lord
nuclear cobblestones, gunline athleticism
and the last of the inherited asthma
children given white dolls to play with and fear
facial expressions borrowed from rich people’s shoe-strings
I can hear hate
And teach hate
And call tools by people names
And name people dead to themselves
no one getting naturalized except federal agents soon
carving the equator into throats soon
I’m sorry to make you relive all of this, Lord
pre-dawn monarchy
friends putting up politician posters then snorting the remainder of the paste
minstrel scripts shoveled into the walls by their elders
my children sharpening quarters on the city’s edge
For these audiences
I project myself into a ghost like state
For these gangsters, I do the same
every now and then, we take a nervous look east
Sleep becomes Christ
Sleep starts growing a racial identity
do you ever spiral, Lord?
has the gang-age betrayed us?
be patient with my poems, Lord
So much pain
there is a point to crime…
There has to be if race traitors come with it
Lord, is that my revolver in your hand?
Better presidents than these have yawned at cages
Have called us holy slaves
Filled the school libraries with cop documentaries
Baby, I don’t have money for food
I have no present moment at all
