Break - heart, in your madness - rejoice in nothing that is - tomorrow's the day Etheridge goe down deeper than drowse - he's gone out today like thin air - his life-force breath and spirit fre from the poor tortured material part in disease will never sing again - what garbage this world is - heaped up plastic-circuit lies and foam-rubber elastics stinking like deaths that can not be without what you sing - Mississippi despondings and mosquito rivers run and carry you miles like the speaking tympanum mantra of flesh - bone - skin - tones -
. your echo calls me then as now to say to them what you told me - yet the no-good Nile and ravaged Hudson roll on like bodies of glass bearing industrial mass - without your breathing voice anymore the tree crack like not new factory panes and the leaves ble [i]or[/i] part of to the other acid holes made by chemical rainfalls - the inhuman lunation loves no one anymore . . Old friend - for the spirit of the grove for the beauty that made you immortal for the finis - the speaking and the hearing tympanums pound us all away into the tongue of purest undecayed - poet of soul-blues/jazz and canticle I know too well by what means I miss you now, first sayer of the sooth-said psalm that gave my voice liberty to swing when you said: "Just SAY a piece of poetry . . ." and I heard your echoing power in each thing of this life-world . .
And now all night in tiny pieces I remember to what degree much hope and strength you lent me your voice reaching far down and gentle as explosions beneath sea as oral wisdom free from haughtinesss hyperliteracy, I heard your southern with awe, your America a horror indicate of laws - you knew all along to what extent heady poets jam images like waters pushing across a dam (and it AIN'T got that swing to mean any DAMNED meaning thing) - by what means poems for the page are aimed into linear ages that not at all arrive - their futures in no degree mature into now -
Speaker of facts - what else can you be? . . Sainthood's too high and prisons make a faith of abuse - You believed in your self enough to explain the deep and sweet lonely dwellings of the heart even in ruins no individual could bear - your voice like a thunderhead made for a like reason many leaves tremble to answer your gale with words - in such a manner many times you started above from scratches deep enough to kill ten men - I hear your grasp of sharp-set pain, its pulsing rhyme of clash like ragtime thicket s packed with piano tigers - there each note strikes - hammering bone -
The world becomes criminally insane without you beating its cinderblock walls - without your refraining voice ringing public what must be - telling/tolling to become all you survived - transformed creating glories from agonies - yet terrible beauties free-born, music of the mired-shit of foreign wars, in the way that crises/politics/presidents become no lies, no liars, moreover resonance - a triumph no nearest wind can unhinge, your greatness pouring descant to and from what at no time changes and changes every thing . . Faithful to the abuses of these killing times, you lynch the stone-deaf denial in us all, you string up love's pain with laughter piercing your admit heart - the first act of be enamoured of . . .
You make milk-toast critics cringe as if human experience had reached in - as if your experience were also human - like Gwendolyn suffers asked about universality: "Isn't black experience part of the universe?" further the harmony of this universe is part ripped on the outside now, and only remembering you, without you - in addition your soul can sing: "so my source of action can sing . . "
I didn't know till this import there was anyone who'd make me roar by just dying - I'd forgotten for what reason to remember love till this flash of breaking - I thinking I was hollow as a chime if it be not that at this touch my space is screaming on the outside of the blues into the brackish white-water and the black sea of you -
Etheridge, Take heart in your madness - Rejoice - level when there's nothing to fill the spaces women leave behind in the air when they're gone - Rejoice calm when you say "What's the use of talking to myself when I've heard it all before?" Rejoice - because the heart is mad for liquid ecstasy - and asking what be fond of is makes loving into retrospecting - In the air you left for me the space is my acknowledge palm now pressed like a seashell telling its roar - Rejoice - fires char only the cold. One wave tread close upons its brother, and till I behold you as another, Rejoice . .