The Trumpet Summons

What is it you want America with your young eyes
            & naïve strands of golden wheat hair?
What do you pray for in your bobby socks
with saddle suede two-tones & bow-biters of Elephants & Mules?

America, you are nothing more than a child in tantrums
            blowing incessant on a trumpet
raging in inability to see yourself as a woman
You are fine cloth in hands of consecrated ugliness
hibiscus & plastic ceremonial buildings toward the Great Eye
            casting as perverse as Uncle’s shadow
            over your skyscraping afros & mountainous shoulders
I am here sweet America,
run into the woven baskets of arms I have outstretched
as wide as river mouths & as long as sunbeams

I am You & You are Us & in Our family no child weeps poor
            no mouth hungers in crusts of bread
                        no skin cracks in dry flakes of afternoon
without first the knowing that we all share in the weep
the gnarling of the fasts & the toiling of modern work grey us All

I freely offer my lips as salves for poisonous veins
            to draw with purposeful & hopeful conviction
                        toward an American clearing of master vision
I am but a freckle on your ever changing blossom
of a cheek            a pin-prick of a peaceful forefinger
& a homespun language with which you innately know

I beg of You to come home
inside vast tenements of poverty inside distorted lenses
            within corrupted halos of congressional servitude
walk bare foot with Us
against these paved expressways of absolution
            where the stripes are both red in whipping
                        & segregated in finite expressions of black versus white
Let collared hands of commerce cease
            in spinning Cosmic Yarn Economy
in the name of Satyagraha & Bapu, let the aching carts
of Main Street bear no more burden of discrimination
than the gabardine wool of starched Wall Street

Let
Woman rejoice in independence as sweet as pipe tobacco
            & let men inhale that flavor as if kisses of warm Sun
Let
Black Nanny know she no longer needs to rock bebbies
in foothill shadows or high reeds come Sunday
in crop fields behind outhouses with moon-slits for doorways
not no mo’~ no mo’

America, your woman eyes will crook in twists of kudzu
uneven in color & fat with lust of Playboy digi-bots
            with smiling shaven laps
& pulling on of red silk thigh-highs
            slowing in the minds of retarded genitals

On porches of every sunset writhes a hot asphalt snake
hissing in drawn cool breaths of the Atlantic
            of kelp & limey mojitos of the Pacific
Every inch of American wriggles tongue-studded
with mileposts across fleshy bellies of city kaleidoscopes
Every American city is her own Mogul Jacko-Lantern
eyes sliced from concrete cheeks as dry as bone

I prophesy! I prophesy in presence of whatever God!
America huffs her trumpet!

There will be chuffing traffic along curves of spiny Railroad
& plumes of crackling cigarette from Seattle harbors
& New Orleans
& Norfolk & San Diego
& long after
Britain take back your godammed whips!
Your gold-splintered deck boards & main sails
            of slave-ships long swallowed in the Reef
Your steelworker hand will be pushed away from the pink
rush of pubescence inside swollen moans of American ass!
The smell of life will light the lungs on fire in Free America!
There will be no more blindness sweet America in the Eye-for-Eye foreheads
            & the million windows of the Infinite Skull will be alive
                        with One Truth

Every religion is a martyr & a master in a borrowed house of a soul
Every deacon is a thug of the offering plate
& Heaven pisses in angry quills of summer storm
Pray sleepless America!
for those strings of Freedom to rise
            onto pearly silhouettes of clouds
& fall ‘round the soft neck of a worthy God

Pray!                   ~for gout baby bellies
the coat-hangar rappels dangling from squatted wombs
the food stamp exhumed paychecks with beating hearts
the crack inoculated jitters on the ultrasound
the drip of hope in wet jizm of backseats
Pray!                   ~for freedom to pray for freedom from freedom

Freedom!
from umbilical chains from the yolks of mortgage oxen
from swinging dat hammer-hunh-
steady bo’ ain’t no rush bebby of Southern Road
from the turning up blue-black faces of mannequins
            stuffed in plastic bags from syringe beaches
from the commands of bony right foot
            to subversive nodding march of the left
from rolled back eyelids of two thousand year old martyrs

Freedom!
from raggedy blankets of homeless dogs
            & their pawing at pouts in empty pockets
from swear-words pouring out my pores like silver moonlight
for heads of lopped off planets caught in crooks of midnight arms

Freedom!
from lost arms still inside granite facades of war memorials
            & from smoky letters of names
                        half expected to be found on the outside
from white-maned figures stalking the darkened Union
            shooting wild at open stars from beneath oak trees
from crickets beneath rickety front porches
            scraping mandolins for night times of Tennessee

Freedom!
from dingy hair rollers washed onto shore
from the sailors last wrapped in strands of cirrus
            before descending into gutters of Eternal Sea

Oh America I can say that I see freedom!
in all those tarnished coins stacked high
in watery palms of ocean floor
in dazzling Puerto Rican eyes
in alloyed hulls of poetry
in disobedient tenements of cockroach prose
            who would find food with plucked out eyes
in slow-grinding saxophones & sexual coffeehouse jazz
in low-lit alligator lakes dreaming of fishbowls
in Joe Frazier keeping one good Cadillac

I see it I do sweet America!

Freedom in cowboy hats of somewhere nowhere
in typewriters stomping forth letters in slick black rain boots to Presidents
in Clay from Louisville
in straw huts where nakedness hunts the tiger meat
in loving Muslims like Mothers offering an ancient Tit
in lips dry from boogaloo & lipstick & quiet cosmetic counters
            selling natural woman back to herself
in movie stars & streams of dragging red, white & blue into imprinted sidewalks

I do see Freedom in insomniac America!
I see that Bitch of America & love her so!

Will she answer the Trumpet Summons or
spittle wrenched out in geometric
            deforming
                        bewildering tongues
lying as if a toddler who has nothing more useful to say