very rough draft, it's been a rough day.

alignment
for Peter of the Earth

when a black man in america finishes school
stays out of trouble, out of jail, out of prison,
isn’t beaten for being gay, only harassed
on the street a few hundred times, finds a butterfly
in amber and keeps it for years, moves out,
crazy roommate number one, insane santaria
neighbor number two, moves back home, makes peace
with both his father and mother, helps raise
his brothers, dances on the Far Rockaway beaches
under both sun and full moon, gives pinecombs for gifts
because what else, makes his curmudgeonly friends
hold hands in the sand at midnight and give thanks, dances
with and without music in clubs and on subways, his internal
metronome a shifting, hip-level thing, when his back
starts to hurt and the doctors say nothing, when his back
continues to hurt and the chiropractor aligns and aligns
and his back continues its twist and can a black man
in america get an MRI can a twenty-eight
twenty-nine year old man talk a system
into growing an ear or a heart or a stethoscope
that can hear an entire lymph system choking
on itself on a cancer not a backache not just
a bad night a bad day listen past the slight lisp
and the club stamp on the inside of the wrist
and not send him to another alignment to say
a man is sick is a man when a black man
in america says want says something’s wrong
it’s not normal what is normal when Nobel
Peace Prize winner Stan Tookie Williams dies
at the state’s, at the nation’s hands and Lawrence
Bittaker and Roy Norris and Theodore Kaczynski
and and and and and and live out their sad
and angry white lives behind bars but live what is
normal when the same week the mayor calls
for a lawsuit against transit workers
need I say mostly of color transit workers need I say
a lawsuit against the threat of a strike an illegal
strike and we’re all glued to our TVs and the news
in the hospital where Peter where a black man
in america says I’d like to make it to my birthday
and the men on the TV talk contingency plans and
lawsuits against potential picketers and clemency
no quarter no respite an eye for an eye your pocket
for my inconvenience my hands are shameful
for how much their line patterns look like systems
of mass transit or org charts of the post-HMO medical
bureaucracy the family should sue Marsha says, mis
diagnosis like that is an actionable complaint she says
/ pneumonia, lymphatic carcinoma, his painter’s hands
in a graphic pose, in California a man refuses water
or last meal from the men who intend to kill him
the mayor’s on the TV and the workers on the tracks
we are burying our brother on a beach in mid-December
in the west they electrocute their unrepenting martyr
the mayor’s on the TV, his wide cot covered in an army
blanket, says we’ll stay here all night, if we have to.

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