22.04.2021 – Letters
Don’t repeat your neighborhood to anyone
.
TEXT BY Tongo Eisen-Martin
That’s my cousin eulogized now in literary history… wasn’t pretty… this effect on my eternal soul
I tried to cry on the side (face in a sink full of alcohol)
Fine flowers of struggle
that color spectrum the cousin
who is dead if you brace yourself
It’s hard to write without my friend
No Malcolm positions on East Coast warfare
My friend—in the audience with the earth’s coming mood
Mainland jazz
The organizing is all over me
Let me divine you the Lenox Ave. of the future…the river just keeps riding freights town to town
Violent revolution in this very year
`
Open your paper to us
Rulers of the night train
Your humble dishwashers who lived to hum the details
To look into the future like a gentleperson
Three fifths of a typewriter
Do some math with me here in the absence of confidence
The luxuries of a paranoia that you can finish later
My friend died yesterday
Like belated parenting, we haunt each other in quick bursts now
Sample the drug
Wrestle the angel
No depth of setting
Hiding behind the hordes because I’m in the train business
You don’t need a ticket for a winter that only happened here
(Behind this room is my mind/ashes runneth over
Throwing around this room is my mind/brim of an innocent soul)
Which dollar deserves my neck?
Thinking about you is like sharing a ghost with half of the city’s afterlife
Thinking about you centers us
I’m just a small man in a basement window chronicling material conditions
Boiling water next to a change in the course of poor people’s consciousness
I cannot impress you with the names of guns
We haunt each other with absolute pragmatism
With the truth of Afrikan transcendence
Another city ends
We hear the fire out
“I never really did like the car they found me in”
Imagine what defines a creature
where remnants of concrete put none of the world down
except slabs of a dead-beat nationalism
or a bloodline making the news again
True, I have an absence of style
Just a door step moving dead body to dead body
Tongo Eisen-Martin is an American radical poet. His poetry strives for bringing light to the contradictions and injustices of society and human relationships. It is informed by his socially and politically engaged practice. Collected works of his include, someone’s dead already, Heaven is All Goodbyes, a book edited by Anthony Huberman on David Hammons that containts work by Eisen-Martin and Fred Moten entitled, David Hammons Is on Our Mind, Waiting behind tornadoes for food and the soon to be published (fall 2021), Blood on the Fog.
Copyright Tongo Eisen-Martin. Published with permission by the author. CC licence is Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
