The Tradition

by Jericho Brown

There is the happiness you have And the happiness you deserve. They sit apart from each other The way you and your mother Sat on opposite ends of the sofa After an ambulance came to take Your father away.

Our actual selves taken down to a cell Then blown back up again, every atomic thing About a piece of my coiled hair on one slide Just as unimportant as anyone else’s Growing in that science Class where I learned what little difference God saw if God saw me. It was the start of one fear, A puny one not much worth mentioning, Narrow as the pencil tucked behind my ear, lost When I reached for it

She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was an American. But she’d say it was because she believed In God. I am ashamed of America And confounded by God. I thank God for my citizenship in spite Of the timer set on my life

I will not shoot myself In the head, and I will not shoot myself In the back, and I will not hang myself With a trashbag, and if I do, I promise you, I will not do it In a police car while handcuffed Or in the jail cell of a town I only know the name of Because I have to drive through it To get home. Yes, I may be at risk, But I promise you, I trust the maggots Who live beneath the floorboards Of my house to do what they must To any carcass more than I trust An officer of the law of the land To shut my eyes like a man Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet So clean my mother could have used it To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will Do it the same way most Americans do, I promise you: cigarette smoke Or a piece of meat on which I choke Or so broke I freeze In one of these winters we keep Calling worst. I promise if you hear Of me dead anywhere near A cop, then that cop killed me. He took Me from us and left my body, which is, No matter what we’ve been taught, Greater than the settlement A city can pay a mother to stop crying, And more beautiful than the new bullet Fished from the folds of my brain.

The blk mind Is a continuous mind. I am not a narrative Form, but dammit if I don’t tell a story. All land owned is land once stolen. So the blues people of the world walk On water. We will not die. Blk music. Blk rage. Blk city of the soul In a very cold town. Blk ice is ice you can’t see.

In him lives my black anger made red. They play. He is not yet incarcerated.

And I sing, again, those songs because I know The value of sweet music when we need to pass The time without wondering what rots beneath our feet.

Scared to see a movie All the way through I got to scream each scene Duck and get down Mass shooting blues

I love a man I know could die And not by way of illness And not by his own hand But because of the color of that hand and all His flawless skin. One joy in it is Understanding he can hurt me But won’t. I thought by now I’d be unhappy Unconscious next to the same lover So many nights in a row. He readies For bed right on the other side Of my fury, but first, I make a braid of us. I don’t sleep until I get what I want.

All my anxiety is separation anxiety. I want to believe you are here with me, But the bed is bigger and the trash Overflows. Someone righteous should Take out my garbage. I am so many odd And enviable things. Righteous is not One of them.

I want you To heed that I’m still here Just beneath your skin and in Each organ The way anger dwells in a man Who studies the history of his nation.

Burg, boro, ville, and wood, I hate those tiny towns, Their obligations.

Let me be Another invisible, Used and forgotten and left To whatever narrow miseries I make for myself Without anybody asking What’s wrong. Concern for my soul offends me, so I live in the city,

I am not a saint Because I keep trying to be a sound, something You will remember Once you’ve lived enough not to believe in heaven.

So the Bible says, in the beginning, Blackness. I am alive.

All that touching or Barely touching, not Saying much, not adding Anything. The cushion Of it, the skin and Occasional sigh, all Seemed like work worth Mastering. I’m sure Somebody died while We made love. Some- Body killed somebody Black. I thought then Of holding you As a political act.