Collectable Blacks

This is the g-dropping vernacular I am stuck in. This is the polyphone where my head is an agrarian gang sign pointing like a percussion mallet to a corn maze in one of the smaller Indiana suburbs where there aren’t supposed to be black folks. Be cool & try to grin it off. Be cool & try to lean it off. Find a kind of black & bet on it. I’m grinning to this vernacular like the big drum laugh tracks a patriotic marching band. Be cool & try to ride the beat the same way me, Pryor, & Ra did driving across the 30th Street Bridge, laughing at these two dudes with big afros like it’s 1981 peeing into the water & looking at the stars. Right before Officer Friendly hit his lights.Face the car, fingers locked behind your heads. Right after the fireworks started popping off. Do I need to call the drug dog? Right after the rattling windows, mosquitoes as busy in my ears as 4th of July traffic cops. Right before the thrill of real planets & pretend planets spun high into the sky, Ra throwing up three West Side fingers, each ringed by pyrotechnic glory & the misnomer of the three of us grinning at the cop’s club down swinging at almost the exact same time Pryor says, Cops put a hurting on your ass, man. & fireworks light up in the same colors as angry knuckles if you don’t duck on the double. Especially on the West Side—more carnivorous than almost any other part of Earth Voyager saw when it snapped a blue picture on its way out of this violently Technicolor heliosphere.