A tattoo is only as permanent as the flesh it's etched upon
Epidermis only as permanent as the edge of the upper echelon
Essence gone when foundations flounder
Constitution change with death of ancient founders

Subdermal, internalized the external
On the parchment, parched to drink something eternal
Though fire dies like fireflies
Scrawled on bald-skin
Idealized and realized as passing like flashing glows from within

Puncturing the pallid papyrus tapestry
Prick by prick, tertiary iris mastery
Grinding at the gypsum
Lining the vellum victim
With elaborate immaculate dictum
animate advocate prism
Adamant infliction
Of shaded chromatism

Complexion, complex in polychromasia
Coloring displays of
Soil, terrain,
Opening like crevasses
Of canvas masses
Tinted with passes
Of piercing passing jabs
And fiercely massive stabs
Crashing waves of rainbows

Like vapor, from solid to dust
Saviors, flavors of cherry reds and oranges, tossed
Yellow mellows and green vines
Minor Chords like blue notes,
Major's swords of violet violence coats
The integument with colorant development

Pigment artificial
Art, official the second the needle penetrates
Ruby radiance emanates
Treasure measured by the pleasure felt inside
The moment they meet the eye
Tangerine tourmaline
Smashed on topaz saffron
Emerald elemental
Sapphire satire
Amethyst artistry,in shades of grey matter,
Artfully, the ink spellunking through part of me
Both in the dark, yet lightly
Parted but only to be replaced
By more dust to fill the vacuum left in its wake
Short and finite stories of Illustrated Man
Impart to the mind's eye, cells of painted sand
Crescent of the sabre sets
On needles painting palettes like crayon sets
Like phonographs or bayonets
Waxing full moon, days reflect
In the depression of the night
Graves inscribed between expressions of light
Gravestones dyed the veneer outside
Doors scribed in pores
I pore this eye over what has been poured
Ink bored like water into cavern floors
Sodium bicarbonate, thru to the core

Hallowed out until quakes fall it down
And undermine the undermine
Under my crust
Metal shines until gripped by rust
Occupation to bring about the occupation
Of illustration on these golems emblazoned
til they succumb to final oxidation
Building paper dolls of contemplation
Food for bookworms, food for thought
Yorick took words of kings
And when ingested are inject into pleasant peasant skin

For Jupitor

Jupitor Hammond was one the first black poets and I owe a debt of gratitude to him as do many other black writers, musicians and artists. His birthday was October 17th 1711 making him three hundred.


I dedicate this day to Jupitor
Whose rings words true
Against the throne of Lucifer
Redemption by thine holy words

Authoring salvation
Addressing Negro subjugation
Precious thy bloody ink spilled for human rights
Like a great red spot, that you did write

Io, Wheatley's Ode to Neptune
You are no satellite
O heavenly son of harp tunes
You are the Apollo of our people's plight
Unaffected by Middle Passage tides

Helios, how you have healed us
Sol, even as you have been sold
Your body chained, they cannot claim your soul
Your sole possession, faith, you soldier on
Soles bonded those influenced by your writing when you speak of our common bonds
Sun of Suns, Hammond Hyperion

You did not planet
Yet you have spun the revolution
Your shadow looms large
Looms of destiny your charge
To span the scale of your importance
One would have to see your pen stroke on millions of portraits

As William Wells Brown's tales
Of the daughter of both Sun and Shade
From Hemmings and Jefferson made
Blessed by Mother Venus's love and Mars' hypocrisy prevailed
Her travails through the cosmos
Clotel as Persephone, her people burn in more than effigy
Black and white and on most surfaces
Surface sentient discrimination
Emptiness, where thousands of wrongs never see illumination
In nebulous nebula, whisked away by Poseidon's Potomac phalange
A life ended rather than suffer enslavement

Les premiers rayons de l’aurore blanchissaient à peine la cime noire
N’ était pas une de ces femmes qui vendent leur amour
Flux, n’avait qu’une petite rivière à traverser pour se trouver au milieu de ces forêts épaisses qui semblent étreindre le nouveau-pays
L'plume parle… vous n’avez qu’un mot à dire… un seul… et elle vivra.
Car il avait soulevé le voile qui cachait le crime de son maître
Et il a change le mulatre a maître
Notre frère de la lune de Jupitor

A Titan of abolition
Your bondage by gravity
Is like your predecessor Jupitor, tied to improbable mission
Freeing minds from prejudiced savagery

Brother Frederick
you have liberated minds from racist rhetoric
You're freedom, freed 'em
Never letting your language languish
Making hopelessness and anguish
Hopefulness sanguine

You have done us a service
Inspired by you, W.E.B Du Bois brought purpose
Lifting a weight on the Souls of Black Folk
You took that yoke
And bore it like a Southern Cross
Advancing your cause
Like a dancing constellation, onward for your people

Marcus,
Our national hero leading our people like Spartacus
No national boundaries where Negros are bound to victims of exploitation
No Solar system can truly shine in subjugation
Appropriation of our proper location
One God, One Aim, One Destination
The perigee, an apogee towards the Mother Earth land
Equality not based on pedigree
A zenith, as Jupitor views its Black Star's circumnavigation

Ganymede, so distant
That'll be the day when you grace all visions
An Invisible Man
Indivisible in that truth is light and light is truth
Reinhart, the paint you fabricate is proof
That Ellison's intelligence in crafting the surreal
The elegance with which he put forth the suffering unseen condition of an unseen existence
The life of a stellar obscurity in a galaxy of bigots

Callisto
Brought to bear this blessing viewed as curse
Two types of prejudice
O Baldwin, still you thirst
To Tell It On The Mountain
Birthing your freedom with streams of social consciousness from ink fountains

The Negro Speaks of Rivers
At the descendents of Zeus's insistence
Langston brought down from Olympus
Hues, soil-shaded as sediment
Fertile sentiments
Cresentic, the words that have grown deep
From Jupitor, we have known them
Black still speak to thee in tribute
Inkwell tributaries that think well literary
Golden, the setting son of giants proficiencies
Stars as beautiful as onyx eyes

Energized, I have ridden on their shoulders, as they rode on yours
Thousands of Miles have you paved
Railroad tiles for Coltrane, laid
An inter temporal, interplanetary muse
Jupitor, you meant to make music
And still you do in the hearts
Of free blacks removed shackles
Your tabernacle, vernacular did part

Linking poet King and X-factor
Martin and Malcolm, would never changed outcomes
Without the will to shout
The words of heaven from mahogany mouths
Their sacrifice tantamount to your speeches
Tigris and Euphrates
Pious in phrasing
You and Grandma Moses' destinies tied for delivering us from Hades
The three headed, gatekeeper and the the river Styx

As well as the Nile
We make no denial that your revolution will not be televised
But from your pieces
Many men intelligized
Gil Scott, hearing your speeches
First in flight
Orbit the knights to make a brighter day
I think I'll call it morning
Ooh child we may feel lost in the fey field of universe
Like Mayfield we must use a verse
Pushing toward our emancipation when we use a verse

Mental slavery, you helped free minds
Jupitor Hammond
Rest in peace of mind
That cogent pieces flowing from your mind
Have been mined and turned like so many rivers, to freedom lines

Murder of My Lungs

With each breath in
A little taste of agony
Quck to breath death in
This ectasy admirably
Known as addiction
It is at my insistence
That it be called what it is,
Compulsion
I, compelled to end my existence
Intrinsic the implications
As I put to the test my organs of circulation
Need an imprint on inhalations
To know limits, to the point of no limitation
Happiness filtered through lungs
Passed along until the brain’s impatience
For that personal sensation
The second hand temptation
The minute arm of temporal displacement
Our fatal fascination
Dazed by self induced pulmonary degradation
Weak we draw the ether near to expectoration
Cardiovascular system
Now feeling the passion and wisdom
Of being tested until enlightened
As if unencumbered, loads lightened
As if floating on a combusting carbon dioxide island
Vapors come busting, muted esophagus silent
Reputed in its quiet
Says more about my will to commit violence
On muy corporeal form to feel alive
When exhalation inspires tracheal tube respiration defiance
Bronchial tissue, taught to fight against a need for oxygen
Diaphragm billows honest in
Diagrammed expression of its need to drag essence
Rent windpipes
Mouth longing for life
I have no contrition
Towards this self inflicted attrition
Coming by Occam’s physician
Parsimonious with sands of time prodigious
Shaving razor thin precious moments
To stop and smell roses
To pause, gasp, mouth open
To push my core to the brink
To the point I think
It can no longer stand my questionable yet rewarding abuses
No uses for gas, O2 overabundant
Why want it if such a bounty resides
My only wish,
To achieve a 4 minute milestone before I die

Lion (is the most fun a girl can have with out taking her fur off)

She prowls, eyes empowering
her intent of devouring
that one weak-minded of the herd
the one that had not heard
the danger in her purr
Soon to become meal for her

That mouth so easy to get lost in
No way out
Search exhaustive for release from her bite
The white stalactites
Ivory lock tight stalagmites
Up go nights
As down fall lives
This cave, a snare
Once it is upon you, escape is rare

To procure her prey,
These technicolor polish claws
Lustered with blood lustrous or
some many that had not got away
These gracefully 2 inch stilletto paws
Even if resistance could be mustered
The sheer power in those legs
Cowardice, fear and plague
The pressure they generate, causes hesitation
The powerless peers, victims of fate
Caught by camouflage epidermal disguise
Plotting to mirage the internal appetite
As she ingests this guys self-loathing

They are consumed by this huntress
Doomed to be punished
By the purveyor of craven consumption
Surveyor of disability and dysfunction
She feeds on it
Sensing their reaction to her
Decrepifying decrees
That roar that says she's
granting sweet mercy for in exchange for free eats
That come with being forsaken
Taken in to her lips to be digested
by her pride
To die invested,
employed as fuel
Enviving, as she is imbibing, with energy she can use
to continue the Krebs cycle
Protein from her bite'll
steel her with another meal
The appeal of peeling them
In twain, her brain satisfied
At her bountiful hunt, gratified
With all the life she's lobotomized
Those glass bottle brown, bottomless eyes
Powerful body
This prowessed palace
Stands as a monument of carnivores
A mysterious, crypsis covered core
With lips hiding a cage trap of incisors
They'll die to get inside her pink puzzle box maw
As this lying lioness of the concrete savannah
That masticates on magistrates, magnates
So that she can validate her now vacant faith in love
Both, predator and prey, salivates as self-respect vacillates
On the urban feeding ground we call a night club

Winning Coffee...du

I sit under the blades of whirring fans
Mind away from blurring glance
A 1 seat touring van
Filled with a cast of characters
Mercurial as uncast quicksilver pans
Pots of coffee calling each other kettle drums
Melted and fluid and when written, crystalline
Mind, pistols, in go bullets of thought
Out come words, triggers pulled in
Figures of speech, bigger than all of us
In a world where all is dust
I, merely a transiently opining transient
Basking in the ambiance of a coffee shop
I fancy it's wall of transparency
All the men on errands seem terribly vacant to me
As they locomotor past
Our paths, cross only once
Yet they've become bullets in my gun
I imagine as they cross my mind, they split my wig
As they have transect storefront windows
Speak to transcend the pain of mourn struck windows
I was born to be stuck in the middle
Until I reach the my end like the husband of widows
Coffee now spittle
Sailing the authorship, fingers twiddle out missiles
Ballistics analysis has me as the answer to the riddle
Of the crime of lighting the spark that set poetry ablaze
A blaze that burned out of control for days
Leaving only a smoldering page
Blackened by craze of factions
Quays, harboring fugitive aquatic assassins
Of love, caring and passion
Sifting, the ash in hopes
That I could save my neck from ropes
No doubt destined to be tighter than boas
Judging by this my focus, sibilant, is on par with spermatozoa
Climbing fallopian tube by tube, inundantia flows like Noah
File further up the poe-tree
Until struck by agent orange in a notably
Encoded rotary buzz saw
Bust raw off the top, reversed and filled with Java
And that brew's what caused this rant
I sit in quicksilver pans
With one to drink, one to smoke
In a coffee shop, under the dance of whirring fans