This rented basement is soundproof, so when

the bass guitar of homesick, make-up band      shudders

for a gone homeland, it’s resonance

pounding into the ground floor,

island children become the beat,

with bones that are loosely hem together,

rocking to and fro against the wave of non-personhood,

because when the                                                   

village where I was born  drops into the

belly of the metropolis undigested it becomes,

in anonymous ways it falls back out as

droppings,

my village & I

& this second-hand bass guitar

if dropped in the belly of this township’s  lake

would no longer be    flotsam swirling downstream,

I am broad big nosed with a  high visibility quotient accent,

accented tongue tied  up in all of this,

I stay a little off     on the periphery

always with bilingual understanding  of other’s tossed epithets,

thinking if my village fell in their lake,

I’d be an anonymous, emaciated island,

banana republic slurs,

solace is in this party 

the bass guitar like a rebel   a    runaway note  

from impersonal stiff-upper lips,

and the bass reminds my bones that I am             free

and the unkept  bass stands away from the corralling,

pounding, deep pounding heartbeats, the floor to trembling

and the bass is deep down the basement of this patrolled township

because my village is uncomfortable in the belly of the metropolis

and I dance because I am free,

I dance because the bass is a lone

actor

breaking the coupling links,

blistered fingers thumbing pylon strings,

because my birth village lives in this bass sound.

White Shirts Came in the Dark — Took Away Emmett Till

those shirts

that were washed clean & crisp

fluttering in an eerie breeze,

no evidence of the meandering blood,

of the boy

at the bottom of the reticent river,

in monochrome circa pictorials

of pyrrhic victory

leaning  on their arms their unblemished starlets,

a legal rinsing, that remake the guilty sinless,

some pieces of the Mississippi soil was of  a silent hypocrisy

some pieces of the land was less hostile,

& still some pieces of the land opened up willingly

to hide the drip  the  drip staining secrets,

upturned   uprooted stones

tire tracks in putty slurry mud,

silent mud, conspiratorial reticent mud,

white shirts that were washed clean of stains

iron crisp like  newly minted dollar bills,

multifaceted monochrome story,

of a boy yanked from innocent sleep,

bleary eyed, forcing his heels to fit in his shoes,

it’s a boy      stillness     of a  boy

at the bottom of a river of death,

of other folks in white shirts

washed clean also,

and the boy, inflated with carbuncle unearthed from the bottom

of the unwashed

never to be cleaned river.