In honor of poet Amiri Baraka coming to Mizzou tonight (tickets were FREE!!), here are a couple of his poems. Baraka is a pretty angry black poet, and I am fully expecting to be yelled at tonight. Fortunately it's being held in Jesse Hall Auditorium, which is enormous (I saw Maya Angelou there last semester...it was amazing) and so he won't actually be able to see me cowering.A Poem for Speculative Hipsters
He had got, finally,
to the forest
of motives. There were no
owls, or hunters. No Connie Chatterleys
resting beautifully
on their backs, having casually
brought socialism
to England.
Only ideas,
and their opposites
Like,
he was really
nowhere.
Monk's World
'Round Midnight
That street where midnight
is round, the moon flat
& blue, where fire engines solo
& cats stand around & look
is Monk's world
When I last saw him, turning around
high from 78 RPM, growling
a landscape of spaced funk
When I last spoke to him, coming out
the Vanguard, he hipped me to my own secrets, like Nat
he dug th enumbers & letters
blowing through the grass
initials & invocations of the past
All the questions I asked Monk He
answered first
in a beret. Why was a high priest staring
Why were the black keys signifying. And who was
wrapped in common magic
like a street empty of everything
except weird birds
The last time Monk smiled I read
the piano's diary. His fingers
where he collected yr feelings
The Bar he circled to underscore
the anonymous laughter of smoke
& posters.
Monk carried equations he danced at you.
What's happening?" We said, as he dipped &
spun. "What's happening?"
"Everything. All the time.
Every googoplex
of a second.
Like a door, he opened, not disappearing
but remaining a distant profile
of intimate revelation.
Oh, man! Monk was digging Trane now
w/o a chaser he drank himself
in. & Trane reported from
the 6th or 7th planet deep in
the Theloniuscape
Where fire engines screamed the blues
& night had a shiny mouth
& scatted flying things.
