After a Shoot at Heckscher Park

After a Shoot at Heckscher Park
While cleaning his lens
my friend was forced
from his car & searched—
one cop shouting
what do you have
what are you dealing
you must have something
until his face blew
like a gunshot
& the other
cop yelled
jesus, another monkey
can’t put the right socks on—
as if my friend’s Brown
cheeks & hightop fade rendered
his one Spongebob
one Jamaican flag sock
accident—
inconceivably quirk
or whimsy
as if, to don asymmetry
amid oaks & willows
he hadn’t climbed Everests of angers
breached grids of munitions
thumbed a thousand beads
down to a simmer
low enough to
claim nature
as his own?
as if he, flash on the hood,
palms on the roof
his beautiful authority
beneath their callous
unscrupulous scrutiny,
wasn’t the real hero?
Lucky this time blue
didn’t stash stash in the glove,
jumpstart my friend’s “record”
mold his sweet clay &
photographer’s hands
into “criminal”
or, worse, unload their immunity
into him, knowing, in their bones
emancipation was Lincoln’s greatest
sleight of hand: a Euro-Matrix
to pull the eye while America returned
Africans to the brutal hull of its ship.
What is freedom when breath
is profiled? When murder itself—
filmed or not—
warrants no conviction?
When, in a land my friend’s ancestors built (for free!)
& to which they were thefted,
no one protects or serves
their preposterous courage
their inexplicable dignity
their right—should anyone have to say this?—
to live?
Tonight, citing no violation,
two police officers
left my friend
on a rock
without a sock
& disappeared.
Poet of the Year
His verse ticks to the meter
of smug scrutiny, worships
at the phallic altar of foppish
bards & their counterparts:
incidental women, who,
in his poems, are
neckline & aura
synecdoche & scent
never possessed of
his speaker’s cock-
sure wit. The women
in his poems echo
like night wolves,
mentor sad flesh,
are brilliant only
in the stoking & stroking
of ego between tropes
of girlish mystery & lunar
chill. Some in this audience—
coached to break glass
in case of male gaze
emergency—know the women
in his poems are furious
& would rather die
than glare furtively
from the birch tree,
rather vent about his small
ideas & bloated conceit
while perched on bathroom
counters perfecting eyeliner,
organic chemistry & the
navigation of men’s
what-have-you-done-for-me
latent content. His reading
persists, ornamented with women
less vital than cigarette smoke,
women scanned like barcodes,
pushed into margins & meant
to find his bearded chuckle
& jokes about Allah
& Planned Parenthood
charming. Having been
granted fewer dimensions
than sheetrock, the women
in his poems have, in my
imagining, ample time
to write clapback poems,
which they do
& perform, too, at festivals
where their words rise &
explode like New Year’s Eve,
bright stanzas blooming
with colors unknown
to the Poet of the Year.
In their poems, he is a creep
in scholar’s clothing,
haughty mimic of
bygone odes intended
not to know
but woo women.
O! How angry
he would be to find
himself the punchline—
a fool whose body
of work had robbed
his body of love.