Poetry

                                     leaves a race behind
                 takes on the music                                      pop
                 its relation                                                    to capital

In the dream my mother pours
a gallon of milk over my head
because her boyfriend held my hand
under the table.

                                    Universal Studios of riot 
                interspersed with whites holding
guns and carrying
people away.

Bile-colored flutes survive along bog rock,
red-veined with a fine fuzz:
canebrake pitchers
hooded against the good rain.

The sound from some other kind of space or 
craft and foot           set in a downtown, US           shots
into windows

The blushed syllable it wore 
with its whole body,
tawny rose-hip orb
of antique origin,

Now it is night again, child on my chest.
I croon & my song drifts you toward rest.

This is not my making any ecstatic,

sleep-deprived screed

“Think,” Aretha Franklin and Ted White, Aretha Now, Atlantic, 1968