My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Seite 61

60

By
YUSEF
KOMUNYAKAA

Words for Billy Bang

Bling

To find shades & colors
among the tuned chaos,
to know moments of midnight
silence, as horse-hair whines
& gallops strings to drag up stars
from the fourth dimension
to find love in war,
life taking two steps
into darkness, three steps
into the tropic light of men
who know too much about blood
on the heroic whispering grass,
& to know exactly when
the hunter’s bow & arrow
become an instrument caught
in the conjurer’s little earthly
song for a bad-ass violin.

Snow flares the gray morning
at the bus stop.
It’s damn cold, but the man’s gold teeth
flash at the young woman
who stares down the boulevard,
plugged i nto metallic-blue earphones,
her painful hooped earrings stealing her glow.
A plated image from the “3rd hour”
dangles from a chain around his neck,
& the gilded weather in Tut’s tomb
opens behind my eyelids. A stone removed.
A door ajar. A room light wounds.
The boy emperor & his treasures undisturbed.
The gold coffin inside a wooden coffin.
Dismantled chariots await charioteers, & history
reverses. “Where’s our ride, bitch?”
Is he talking to me, the woman, or himself?
The cold works on him, icy knives
whittling down the man his mama wanted,
& sadness boards the bus as smoke
curls up from the black tailpipe.