Fashion this, from the Irony of the world.

Baraka, Amiri

Fashion this, from the Iroy
Of the world

   That I, the undaunted Laureate of the place, daunted in some
   Un as yet/ed pre tense of what they see, they be
   As if, such where they was
   Was yet to be, and then to say
   They is, and is not, like revelations, wow!
   Humans. The skin, the lodging inside dumbness a slight breeze frees
   they speech
   To speak as if acquainted with small things in the world. Eating,
   Belching, Farting, Murder, Robbery.
   And so. As if, and them too they is. But nothing further
   But the wee dots on the deletion resembling the minds of them
   Yet to come.

   Imagine you were me, or imagine you were thee
   And we knew all the things both do. And is. And will ourselves
   To be. Imagine you were in this place, and they wanted to run
   everywhere pointless endless understanding not even why
   They smell or they hair fall out, or what to do about
   Gout. That they are yet stupid to colds and cancer and death-They
   think holy
   And ultimate. When death is simply a report card
   Of the ignorant. Nothing dies but that which never lived
   And it might return in a white suit and be in charge of ugly small
   mistakes
   Somebody at Harvard could win a billion dollars and a post
   If they cd find out but they never will because it is the reason
   They committed suicide.

   Suppose you had to live with
   Ignorant white people and negroes
   In cages, with important chains
   Around they mouths. Suppose you
   Had heard of Trent Lott. Suppose, you woke up one am

   And there was a vampire on the tube
   Being interviewed by a Niggalino boob
   A handsome rat, for whom the idea of brain
   Was only an idea, which he did not think if he could
   Was a bad one. And the boob was a killer yet to graduate
   From killer school so he worshiped the vampire's teeth,
   The two juicy fangs hanging from each end of his lip,
   The negro thought was hip. And dreamed of having
   Teefs like that so he could be a rat, he was tired of being
   A mere heel. And the vampire was planning to bite the whole
   World. To suck the blood out of everything. To suck the blood
   Out of the world and make its future a vampire, that could whirl
   though
   Space and suck the blood out of the stars, suck the blood out of
   the planets
   Suck the blood out of the moon, suck the blood out of the sun
   And then, armed and blubbery fat with everything's blood, still hot
   And musical like emptiness, he could lift into the outer
   waygonesphere
   And search for God, if there was such, and suck the blood out of
   Him, Her, It, Them Whatever, till there was no Blood anywhere,
   not even you, Blood, in fact
   You be one of the first to go.

   It was a special issue of Jungle Comics, where the vampire the
   thin-nosed kind
   From the out back, who can suck with his teef and stir with his
   nose, whose eyes
   Are missing, and what you see is the bottom of a cold mine filled
   with 2000 fathoms
   Of Lynch, Execution, Missing, Rape, Cheated, Framed, Slandered,
   Stolen, Frown frozen ex corpuscles, hid under the glistening
   listening underwater ASSCRAFT of the Satanic moron cult, whose
   breath is toxic and pokes holes in the sky so dead things
   Can shit on our food.

   He is called Fonnghool the asshole, and dances to dry lips set on
   fire by missing junkies he has eaten. He is the devil's newspaper
   and wears his ass backwards so the colon can
   Wear a uniform. And Revelations can be burned especially 18:12
   where it say beware of ugly motherfuckers who is not really ugly
   motherfuckers but uglier much, much, much uglier dan dat! So
   spake Nat! Amen.

   I speak with the rage of Angels
   Them that be with Marx.
   I speak with the clarity and inferno of the necessary
   Like my man John on Patmos watching skyvision and
   Digging it was all commercials.

   I speak like Ali Baba ("The Arabian Pope"),
   who when he spoke the magic words,
   "Open this sucker up," and the mountain swang, envisioned one day
   There would be a John named Trane who would blow the same shit
   I blow with the deep fear of John on the island looking at the
   actual devil
   I am like him in that I try to count the mammyjammerg heads and
   horns
   And find out what will kill him.

   I speak like him who spoke to Philadelphia and hung out with Jesus
   Before they murdered him. I speak like him who dug that Peter
   Was a coward and gave the Lord up, and that Paul was an Anti-Semite
   Who never came out the closet.

   I speak as one who knew Judas would drop a dime on the Movement
   And confirmed the chump had hung his lousy self just before I got
   busted.

   I speak as one betrayed by the lies of those who say they are
   religious but
   Are greed ridden worshipers of Satan, who kill anyone who opposes
   them and calls it a church of Defense against Evil.

   Like John, I wd speak, like the John who baptized, like John the
   knower, John,
   the Blower. John the Brown and John the Revelator. I speak like
   James the Brother, James the other, Jim the hip, like Dick the
   Rude, like Bird the high, like Monk the Deep I speak from the
   island of my soul, and cast a terrified look into the sky filled
   with
   monsters, with witches and devils with Great Whores and Beasts,
   of things with heads and horns and blood dripping out of their
   eyes.

   It is out, imagine, you were here, in this place, staring into the
   soul of something
   Filthy, trying to keep it from murdering you, to keep your eyes
   from registering,
   Your ears from hearing, your mouth from reporting. And you could
   feel it breathing on your neck and saw sometimes the shadow of
   its horny hands reaching out of the
   Blind dark you cd see the shadow of its gun its lie its teeth
   sweating.
   Imagine you could actually understand its obscene ideas, and
   they made you enter the mind of Fred Douglass
   And stare out at the ocean just as John at the edge of Africa,
   staring at the
   Overhead commercials on the death of the Beast.

   And so the blessing that is in my name and in my words, I give to
   myself
   And you who are truthful as the actual life of the world. And it is
   this blessing
   Which will save us, will make us strong, as we go on with our work
   of scientifically
   Determining how to kill the beast. Each night I fill my notebooks
   with formulae
   And instructions to myself and others on what to do of what to
   study of where to
   Go who to talk to and when. I make lists of words, names, events,
   processes, necessary stages of what we have come to realize is
   protracted. And what we do we will do.
   And what we succeed at is worth the pain, what we fail at is worth
   the understanding if we can understand. What the next step is.
   We are studying with all our minds and hearts and souls'
   determination to understand how to slay the serpent. This task
   Nat handed down to whoever did understand that that was what he
   did, hanging on
   That tree. Slain by the Serpent's hosts.

   So we have learned that we can not die except by our own submission
   to it.
   And have decided we will not die except when we understand what
   place we go to.
   And so begin to set that where in order and begin to understand
   where the beast
   Will be hiding. We are the Rider of The Black Horse. Black Horse
   Black
   Rider, who conquers with a scale. With Justice and Measure and the
   mighty pentatonic mode of the finite music of infinity, a new
   joint ...

   And when I returned from this forwarding of my feeling and knowing
   The beast sat still and teeth wiggled with lies and at once I
   remembered where
   Before I'd seen him, before his tenure as the Counterfeit Ghost
   of The Caucasian Crib. Yes, it was the same one. Remember the
   little

   Devil Gerald 2X arrested and placed in the pages of Muhammad
   Speaks.
   And we saw him where Malcolm had locked him up, with the little
   Horns out his head the evil eyes and the twin fang straws for
   sucking oil and blood.

   It got clear to me as he rose to leave, and the negro boob
   slobbered happiness
   At being recognized as the newest commode in the Caucasian abode,
   the vampire
   Turned and where before the cunning little tail that used to dangle
   out his hiney
   Struck me at its absence, Oh, I thought, and at that moment I saw
   the thing dart
   Like a copper head's fart out of the negroes' curled lips, ringed
   with the white chalk
   Caucasian Circle of Merit which identifies Wooden Negroes promoted
   to the honorary genus of Homo Locus Subsidere (Literally,
   'Near Man'), who no longer kneel when they are made well paid
   heels, but now can assume the funky bedbug crouch of the
   Hideously self-hating. At the same time, they are given a grey
   facsimile carte blanche
   Weapon of Ugliness to use against N words and any who wd violate
   the sanctity
   Of northern appetite! And so I came to understand that the beast's
   deadly arrow,
   Shot from out the 1st horseman's white bow, from the white horse,
   the weapon which Revelations prophesied to John, was the
   weapon of his transitory rule, was now
   The tongue of the boob, whom I err at calling him that, or rat, or
   heel, or dog, or
   Traitor. That tail become a tongue was the sign, that from the
   vampire's tail
   Was bestowed on the wooden negro a badge that allowed him to
   enter Klan meetings,
   Skin Head Lynchings, Texas Executions, Palestinian Ethnic
   Cleansings,
   and report
   With the slobber of his terrificatious white-ringed serpent's
   beak, symbol, font & punctuation on the tabula rasa of the media
   sheet the empty echo of his eviscerated
   Self, and in the soul's place that beast's tail was hung that
   beast's tale was sung.

   And I stood, remembering Patmos, and the images that sailed across
   the air
   When you and I was there. And wondered what next the world of
   this life held for those
   Who would love goodness.