photo by Alex Lear
I Want To Talk About You
(for my sister Czerny)
this poem was supposed to be
for/abt you but as i was thinking
i felt another need
& know in order to truth talk
abt you i had to truth talk
abt how our hours
on this earth spot
some call a civilized nation
has been bitter centuries long
long, long after the chains fell
our unhealed scars are serious sores
still too tender to touch
abt how few
of us really comprehend the enormity
of our history of captivity
not only the horror of what was done to us
but what the residue of that historic undoing
continues to do to us today
our genitals were
put on public display
if you were white
you could see cleotis' thing
silent in a sealed see-through coffin
howard kept the sinister cylinder at his shop
behind the unpainted cypress wood counter
out of plain sight but was always proud
to hoist the mason jar
with the shiriveled, pickled penis
into the surprise of sunlit delight
and the carefree hoots of the gathered
good old boys, although we never knew
who actually did the cutting
we all knew where the evidence was kept
they say in france they got
the vagina of our sister entombed
(for medical research of course)
venus, the "hottentot venus"
they sarcastically called her,
and when she was alive they paraded her
naked on a pay per view basis
and people paid to see how big her butt
was, and later after she died, how big
her vagina was, and the worse
part was that crowds of humans
actually went and oohed and ahhed
and paid money to see something
the creator gave to all of us
could my name be cleotis
could your name be venus
& why should anyone want
to trophy our genitals?
i turn over naked
in my nude sleep sometimes,
hold myself hard with my hand
and imagine the pain
and wonder how does a man
live without himself?
what i really want to talk abt
is how we lived despite
the mutilations
i am so impressed by the beauty
of a people who can survive
the public display of our privates,
who could rise the next morning
face the pain and still believe
in living a good life
you are one of those old ones
the women who tear-washed
and bare-handedly buried the broken bodies
cauterized wounds and stitched together
some kind of tough, tough love
that mended men
and raised the manchild even after
the man was gone
this poem is
for you and all the race
women like you who continue
to feed us reason to live
when suicide seems unavoidably sensible
me and all my manhood
bears daily witness
i would be nothing were it not
for the redemptive love
of certain of my sisters, my mothers
my aunts, grandmothers and
women friends securely umbilicaling
sustenance into my soul
all the remaining years of my life
i will never cease
wanting to talk abt you
needing to talk abt you
to talk abt you
talk abt you
—kalamu ya salaam