Black Beneath the Skin: "Rythm in G-major"

There are rosary beads kissing the lint at your thighs;
but you shove
your hands
deep into your damaged sanity
instead.

Perhaps the maroon lips of prayers you've yet to utterintimidate you?

Is that why you step with rocks in your bombed out shell-toed sneakers?

Pieces
of your 'hood
weighing you down , like sediment
to a white man's saliva -
You'll always get caught flappin' your feet
uselessly
before red waves crashing on blue moons
if you don't remove
your city
from your Herme's slippers.

Feet were meant to fly.

So your wing-checked Nike's are good for nothing but dancing cuban sunset-drum-trumpet-nights awaywith empty hips,and barren,echoless steps of Victory...
like your oppressed peoples.

You're only stirring dustin the wastelands.

Those pebbles are just the leftover brainmatterof brown stepping stonesin a nappy-headed-cotton crowd.

Skulls bridging riverbeds;
necks crowning tree limbs.

I do not blame you for dragging that rythmic baggage,
because your prayers jingle like Christmas morning
in a shack too small to hold any green fern
ten acres down-wind
of the Big House.

But your teeth make sweet sounds too.

You are a metallic melody,
click-clack-cockin'-back the quick sour smack of sugar bullets
on your tongue.
It's gotten so that,
every profanity you spit murks one more wordless supplication to God
during a breeze-less
Brooklyn
summer
day.

What happens when you have no more hail mary's left to run to?

I guess,
you'll just take a muffled crip-walk-draggin'-rasping-yellow breath-city-skyline-storybook-cyphers-in Prospect Park-like verbal gang gunshots -

to your death.

...Your rosaries have flown away from you...
...and you ain't left wit nothin' but one last empty prayer.
Your own personal rapture.

Goodnight, young street-soldier.