Moon Cricket

I have been living           despite myself

my territory hemmed by mud and threat

of mud          If there is a land without its own

subliminal violences          this night offers no

defense of what has died in it          Some things

are only nourished in a stutter of kudzu

and the inconsistencies of silver the moon

shucks off           Casual machines honey the dark

with the monotony of their health while

one theory of soil chokes out another           See

no land without violence          I’ve been staving off

the obvious           It is dark and so am I

Earlier heat makes me lush with failed stars

I tell the homies           Living in Mississippi is like living

on the moon and I mean every day brings

several weathers and I am never dressed

for any of them           Kudzu in the right light

is like a gold front on a disintegrating tooth

Since I got here I have not written any throat

that was not straddled by something uninvited

The ground is brimming with sirens and children

of sirens          I have been living in an idea of dark

come from another man’s mind           watching

the rain loose inconvenient silk imagining

what lives in the soil the asphalt choked out

If the clouds are the capital city of a country

of perfect memory                    then I am afraid          

No ocean formed against me will abandon me

Lately           the stars are dim so I count the niggas

I wish would try me           I have walked into the dark

seeking a saddle          and emerged with merely hands

I rock a trampled violet           play moonlight in reverse

blued with desire          I antithesis a lineage          I do not leave

because how will I get home           I have been here before

Flesh tenored with desperation escape          like night

demands recursion           Opaque as land before a man bridled

the light           I am lonely in the season that widows everything

I have been waiting to tender the moon face an ancestral purple

I have been mothering a rage when I forget how to say escape

My favorite songs in any year all translate to Run or Mine

I am at my most named in the dark           sing into a parallel quiet          

name the song for the tether it casts          pleading silver          

toward a geography of light we barely name

I reach my hand out to a space of no stars

Where the clouds have torn like cotton          I forget

How much I love a song which muscles the silence

How much I would give for a grammar of no slaves

O historical dead           I am come from your unlanguaged apocalypse

like an ugly and deserved weather           Watch me

eclipse their dark with my own           Watch me citizen

the absence of your names