Chorus
Authors: Saul Williams
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a few words
Shut up and sit down. New Age be damned if the old do not heed the voice and concerns of the young. Here are the voices of many, woven into one. If each face is a book, here is a testament: the groundplan of a social network. Here are our fears, disbeliefs, visions, and wishes welded into words. Here is our love, our desires, sprung from the incessant chatterbox of our adolescence. Here is the voice of the un-dead and the un-Âcompromised. Make no tradition of this. We have had enough.
moderato cantabile
blah blah hard-hitting
first line.
some bullshit about where I'm at.
connecting it
to something
seemingly irrelevant.
elevating a combination
of mundane thoughts
to the epic.
ask a question
to throw everyone off.
explain the past
in terms acceptable
to the present.
challenge the present
to re-consider
its coping mechanisms.
blame myself in the process.
free myself in the blame.
write about
all that I'm going to do about it.
run the risk of being condescending.
get dangerously close
to threatening.
shrug off rejection,
secretly expecting acceptance.
not saying anything about it,
as the next line
disarms with the word, âpoop,'
put in a creative context.
feel accomplished for typing,
not trying.
get tired
of thinking what comes next.
insert trademark
unconsciously.
wonder how much more
before I can stop
and go back to the luxury
of lifestyle.
prepare the rationale
that denies the distraction.
write down
whatever it takes
to not think
the word waste.
end with superiority complex
wrapped in
the cleverest thing
they done ever did
heard.
At the end of your ten-day meditation retreat
you got in your car
drove thirty peaceful feet
and ran over a bird,
splayed its holy guts on the pavement
like god finger-painting fuck you
across that deep breath
you were holding
the way your mother held her first born.
You, thank goodness,
were torn from the bible
the day before they burned it
for the verse about dancing to tambourines.
Once
you saw the blood of Christ on a knife
carving redwood trees into church pews.
Now every Sunday morning
you hear glaciers melting
and you see the feathers in your rearview mirror
scattering like prayers
searching for a safe place to land.
Hold me to my word
when I tell you I will leave today,
catch a bus ticket west
just to stand in the center of your highway
stopping traffic 'til every feather's answered.
I've seen too many prayers
caught in the grills of eighteen-wheelers.
And folks like us, we've got
shoulder blades that rust in the rain,
but they're still G sharp
whenever our spinal chords are tuned
to the key of redemption.
So go ahead world, pick us
to make things better.
You wanna know what the right wing never got?
We never question the existence of god.
What we question is his bulldozer
turning Palestine into a gas chamber.
What we question is the manger in Macy's
and the sweatshops our children call the North Pole.
What we question is the idea of a heaven
having gates.
Have you never stood on the end of a pier
watching the moon live up to her name?
Have you never looked in the eyes of a thief
and seen his children's hungry bellies?
Some days my heart beats so fast
my ribcage sounds like a fucking railroad track
and my breath is a train I just can't catch.
So when my friends go filling their lungs with yes,
when they're peeling off their armor
and falling like snowflakes on your holy tongue, God
collect the feathers.
We are thick skin
covering nothing but wishbones.
Break in. You'll find
notebooks full of jaw lines
we wrote to religion's clenched fist.
Yeah, we bruise easy.
But the sound of our bouncing back
is a grand canyon full of choir claps
and our five pointed stars
have always been open to the answer,
whatever it is.
Look me in the bullseye,
in the laws I broke
and the promises I didn't,
in the batteries I found when the lights went out
and the prayers I found when the brakes did too.
I've got this moment
and no idea when it will end,
but every second of this life
is scripture.
And to know that, trust me,
we don't need to be born
again.
i begin in a rude place praying awkwardly
my body is ugly. and a consequence of silence.
i watched myself being born
i came from crocodile mouths,
i swam thru the bronx of my mother's belly
she married those cracks in bible passages. her jesus-witch-brew
cried a liquid city between thighs and
blurred
bookcases until a heartbeat broke
centuries
a noisemaker spat and bled thru his golden horn.
a poet held me down on a bed.
this is old news,
all
the stethoscopes have told it before
silence is scary.
i watch
the singing ones
and i want to move in their throats
and i want to sleep in them and wake
and not be so scared allthetime.
i don't want to talk about
the kissing ones
or the ones who are smaller than their mouths who die in the middle of the street and how small children are chastised for wanting to touch them. who are the lullaby god's Worst . . . or the funksmell that follows them across bridges and beneath breasts and powders armpits with their crying.
if i could tell you i love you in a language
where
fear didn't exist
i know
i would remember the earth as a piece of my chest
I.
you kiss my breasts
and the blood gathers beneath my skin just to be near you.
becomes
the
place i bathe you
a
shimmering
mineral pool of diamonds and berries
oshun's honey and magnolia blossoms in bloom.
this is my
dream
. . .
i am a mermaid
youâ
on the shore cutting watermelon
y
o
uâ
f
eeding me
youâ
rubbing oil into my hot body.
you and i
a river
running through us.
II.
this was me before youâ
mouth wide in the arkansas lapping the waves
that
flowed
from your hands.
my feet in the river
pressing blessings
through
rocks and mud
sending godlove anointed water to you.
i
praye
d fo
r
youâ
through lotawatah/ and tenkiller/
and eufala/ bird creek.
deep fork.
through
waters surrounded by
land and air.
o
pen
sky
.
through lakes and rivers who'd heard rumors
of the sight
of
the
sea
.
how the very presence of it will
drop
you
to
your
knees.
i sang your ship to me
sang
the siren song that was in my belly the first time I saw your face
your eyes
the unbearable beauty of you.
come to me come to me come to me come to me come to me
if you had sailed away from me . . .
if you had sailed away from me
i would have died on this rock
fish falling
through
my fingers like sighs.
you listened to me-
  through the altamaha/ and the o
ho
o
pe
e/
the ogeechee.
  the flint/ocmulgee/the mighty chattahoochee.
your heart and soul swimming to me.
and
now?
there is nothing else that sustains me.
sweet soft. a quick/lick from a sugared spoon.
III.
your rivers are georgia pines deeper than green.
the liquor in a pot of collards. a smoky bone.
the tip of your tongue in my mouth.
taste the salt o
f
my t
ear
s.
you are macon mud rich