Lower-Class Artist Imagines
by Tongo Eisen-Martin
Grip my heart tighter, Lord
Help me write on this sleeve…
like listening to Nina Simone later in life
The poet takes over for his
former self:
The secret to writing poems
is to not deflect.
If you do not know anything
fretted about the color blue,
don’t go calling yourself a
child at heart.
If you have never improvised
an elevator ride,
don’t go calling yourself in
need of prayer.
Grace be to gang tattoos
a Reagan meeting adjourns and modern plant life begins
along with dry out-of-body insight
strange fake forest in
a poor person’s bird atrium
bark around the Mississippi mixtape or
Carceral state mythology of a factory’s first Black Chaplin
Rotted food staring at a child
The minor progressions of revolution
drumming Molotov fills
three quarters and a floor stain staring as well
white children selling a child
(I mean I was there the night that
San Francisco disappeared)
Think of me when the sun dies
Half man on scratch paper
Half pickpocket with flailing arms
double fisted
Alabama in my Paris
I am an alcoholic in search of history books
ruining the light rail in search of
history books
(I am limping to poetry)
Along with a caste of haves-adjacent
A slave deck blossoms sweet baby Easter blood
Maybe loss of crossroad
along with unprovable music theory
(the poem turns into absolute political failure)
You know, not for nothing,
the way you all like to blame the devil for every fallen intellectual
every repass fist fight
for every 28 hours in hurricane America
blame him for every ballot burning
for every shallow pot, pan and murder-man
for every government plant, sloppy musician, and federally-flagged artist
for every floorplan of capitalists’ emotive geometry
and private school’s private anthems
for every kid in a cage
the way you all blame him, man, the devil must be in the sky too
eyes lowered in the land of the blind
a mumbler with a gun/I am the
worst of your weapons, Lord
Won’t
you put a
space heater
in my grave
Kick Drum Only
by Tongo Eisen-Martin
All street life to a certain extent starts fair
Sometimes with a spiritual memory even
Predawn soul-clap/ your father dying even
Maybe I’ve pushed the city too far
My sensitivities to landfill districting and
minstrel whistles/ modal gangsterism
White supremacist graffiti on westbound
rail guards
-all overcome and
reauthored
revolutionary violence that chose its own protagonists
or muted stage of genius
The garbage is growing voices
Condensed Marxism
for warrior-depressives
Underpasses in their pockets
Because they just might be deities
or decent bid on the Panther name
A merciful Marxism
Disquieted home life
Or metaphor for relaxing next to a person
Who is relaxing next to a gun
I stare at my father for a few seconds
Then return to my upbringing
Return to the souls of Ohio Black folks
Revolution is damn near pagan at this point
You know what the clown wants? The respect of the ant.
Wants to interpret pain only
wants your old soul to turn young
see ancestors in broad day light
wants to pull a .38 out of a begging bowl
wants me to hurt my hand on this pen
I am not tired of these rooms; just tired of the world that give them a relativity
My only change of clothes prosecuted
The government has finally learned how to write poems
shoot-outs that briefly align…
that make up a parable
white bodies are paid well, I posit
do white men actually even have leaders?
all white people are white men
A rat pictures a river
Can almost taste the racial divide
Can almost roll a family member’s head into a city hall legislative chamber
Knows who in this good book will fly
all I do is practice, Lord
I have decided not to talk out of anger ever again
Met my wife at the same time I met new audience members for our pain
We passed each other cigarettes and watched cops win
A city gone uniquely linear
Harlem of the West due a true universe
“I will always remember you in fancy clothes,” my wife said
so here I sit… twisting in silk ideation
My rifle made of post-bellum tar
My targets made of an honest language
This San Francisco poetry is how God knows that it is me whining
Writing among the lesser-respected wolves
Lesser-observed militarization
Dixie-less prison bookkeeping/I mean the California gray-coats are coming
lynch mob gossip and bourgeois debt collection
I mean, it’s tempting to change professions mid-poem
in a Chicago briefing, a white sergeant saying, “blank slate for all of us after this Black organizer
is dead.”
standard academics toasting two-buck wine at the tank parade
bay of nothing, Lord
nuclear cobblestones, gunline athleticism
and the last of the inherited asthma
children given white dolls to play with and fear
facial expressions borrowed from rich people’s shoe strings
I can hear hate
And teach hate
And call tools by people names
And name people dead to themselves
no one getting naturalized except federal agents soon
carving the equator into throats soon
I’m sorry to make you relive all of this, Lord
pre-dawn monarchy
friends putting up politician posters then snorting the remainder of the paste
minstrel scripts shoveled into the walls by their elders
my children sharpening quarters on the city’s edge
For these audiences
I project myself into a ghost like state
For these gangsters, I do the same
every now and then, we take a nervous look east
Sleep becomes Christ
Sleep starts growing a racial identity
do you ever spiral, Lord?
has the gang-age betrayed us?
be patient with my poems, Lord
So much pain
there is a point to crime…
There has to be if race traitors come with it
Lord, is that my revolver in your hand?
Better presidents than these have yawned at cages
Have called us holy slaves
Filled the school libraries with cop documentaries
Baby, I don’t have money for food
I have no present moment at all
Knees Next to Their Wallets
by Tongo Eisen-Martin
Fast cash smuggled through my infant torso
I arrived smiling
Coral check-cashing spots seal my eyes
Hearing voices,
but none of them sing to me
I am lucky to be a metaphor for no one
Washing my face with the memory of water
my back to the edge of a chessboard
I mean I’m settling into a petty arrest record
With my face laid flat on an apartment kitchen table
Mississippi linoleum begins
government plants braiding together breathing tubes
A Greek philosopher takes the path of least resistance
The bronze corporation age dawns
Citizen council rest haven
Coachable white nationalism
In board rooms, they ask if county line skin
can be churned directly into cornflakes
A senate’s special chain gang mines
our neighborhood for evidence of continent unity
Makes a mess of the word “kin”
Makes a war report
out of a family’s secret chord progression
Makes white people geniuses
Lynch mob freaks rehearse their show tunes
in the courthouse walls that they take for mirrors
Rehearse for a president’s pat on the head
A pat on the head
that they take for audience laughter
A lot of “sir”s in the soup
A lot of speed
Treaty ink stained teeth
write themselves a grin
Imperialist speech writers’ grins
boil over in my ink-riddled mind
A non-future dripping with real people
I mean, real people…Not poem people
A street with no servants somehow
A soul singer/somehow in the west
Consolation eternity
or
The poor man’s fish order
This half of a half of a spirit
Or husk of a messiah
Religious memorabilia made from the wood of a
prison farm fence
For sibling domestic colonies and
the not-for-profit Tuesday meltdowns
We do straightforward time
dehydration takes hold of the police state
every 28 hours
the house dares the slave
doesn’t matter if you name a building Du Bois a thousand times
What really turns you into a sergeant mention
Turns you into a landslide of sirens
layout sketches passed between deacons
Plot twists provided by white beggars
In a Black city
The fathers who Reagan flicked
Kicking garbage thinking about rates of production
Notebooks dangling out of car windows
System makes a psychic adjustment
We Go the way of
Now-extinct hand gestures
Mediterranean sandals and underground moods
in tandem
I mean, whoever I am today is still your friend
Crooked cops and crooked news junkies
Amaudo Diallo is your mind on military science
Mario Woods the gang enhancement they even put on God
If you turn down the television low enough, you can hear San Francisco begging for more war
profiteering
We will not live forever, but someone out there wants us to
As mice pouring through an hour glass
In Olympus, Babylon
Or Babylon, Olympus
subway car smoke session
making its way into an interrogation room
(Maybe it is all just one room.
It’s definitely all just one smoker)
Live from your
monotheistic toy collection
Poor people writing letters
near books about Malcolm X
Ice pick in the art
new floor boards for
Watts prophesy
Pen twitching over scrap paper
Pen tweaking while
Smoothly a bus driver delivers incarcerated children
The Lord’s door opens
Oct 12, 2020
Tongo Eisen-Martin is a San Francisco-based poet and activist. He is the current Poet Laureate of San Francisco. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. His book Blood on the Fog (City Lights, 2021), was recently named by the New York Times as one of the top ten poetry books published in 2021. He is the cofounder of Black Freighter Press. He teaches poetry for SF Creative Writing Institute and is a frequently featured artist at our readings.
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Dispatches from Quarantine 