Maybe the Saddest Thing Read Free

blacktop
    sweating off layers in sun. Like police tape
    singed with flame. From this point of view
    soot cloaks stars. Even a white, grinning moon
    finds its cheekbones eliminated here. I’m talking
    about real lives and white rock rubble. Eyelids,
    pocked with reddening cinder. Noses, eroded
    and raw. I’m wondering if a face on fire
    looks the same in any city. In any hue.
    A phone rings an answering machine awake.
    The trailing silence hearkens a boarded-up
    project building. And in one great big empty
    alleyway after another, people are boxed in
    or burning up. Vanishing into thin air. Here
    I am again, sketch pad in hand, glued to this spot
    watching smoke stifle everything—white
    and black chess pieces melting in slow mo.

The Chronic
    & the mother cops a stiff
    pull from the glass bong.
    & murky water gurgling
    in the bulb-like chamber
    is barely heard but indistinctly
    audible over Roy Ayers’s
    interstellar vibe. & smoke clouds
    the bong’s fat green neck
    & glides down the woman’s throat
    into her belly
    where it blooms into a beautiful
    exhale.     Toke two
    takes the same route
    but springboards
    from the gut, splatters
    a brain cell. & in that small
    space & for nine sublime songs
    sun trickles into her thoughts.
    She thinks about hydroponics. About
    five-gallon buckets & fertilizer.
    About thousand-watt sodium vapor
    lights, pruning shears &
    the invisible hand. She considers
    the self-regulating nature
    of a marketplace. How it’s all bullshit
    & doesn’t apply to her
    life. How her insides are a kind
    of marketplace. She thinks
    about supply & demand &
    obtrusively marked state lines.
    About how people are never this way.
    How our states are so rarely
    pronounced. The way we’re always
    passing through this & that
    in the supermarket or Laundromat &
    without batting an eyelash.
    She contemplates clam chowder.
    How it costs a buck
    but triggers New England
    Xmas morns, gifts netting
    her childhood & the bed
    of a pickup truck—
    a man’s hand hooking her throat.
    She thinks about dirt roads &
    green, green grass. The number
    of yards crossed
    to put a ziplocked smile
    in her hands. & it doesn’t
    matter what’s bothering the woman.
    It’s heavy. & back in the room
    her two little boys are laughing &
    zooming toy cars along carpet
    or coiling springy phone cords
    around their necks. & good
    or bad those kids are learning something.
    Some states are harder to access
    every year. & the mother could just
    as easily be a father. & down
    the block & around the corner & in
    double-wides & mansions
    this is happening. & these people sit
    inches from your cubicle.
    They teach in your schools & sing
    in your choir. Make your lattes
    & dental appointments. They walk
    your streets & sleep in
    your bed. & on & on & on. &
    sometimes these people
    are you.

The Break Beat Break
    originates from “Break Beat.” As in,
    the faithful kick drum ride cymbal solo pattern
    that never fails to unlock a host of holy ghosts
    in any B-boy with a pulse. As in, James Brown.
    Anything by James. As in, the “Amen Break”—
    six seconds of a liquored-up Gospel B-side.
    The break in Break Beat Break comes from you.
    It is part of our collective audio unconscious.
    A pause for the cause. The cause being the body’s
    never-ending addiction to movement, which, spun
    backward on a turntable, would reveal a link
    to thought. It happens on a deserted island
    of a song, when a funky-ass fault line rips through
    your bass-induced Buddhist empty state and you
    start thinking, Damn. What breed of human am I?
    What type of man walks around with rhythm rattling
    the trunk of his dome? And wherever you are you run
    to the closest piece of light-reflecting glass, say Oh ,
    that’s right, I do. You become a drum-dumb addict
    and never recover. You let the Break Beat break
    into your closet. Headphones on, you nod toward
    high-water cords, think Yeah,