-- To Major Jackson, from Gadsden, Alabama

the way I wished.



I could have seen the world, the sky

those nights when I pressed my ear

to the speakers and dialed the tuner



through Birmingham,

Jackson, New Orleans, reaching

for the sound of some beyond,

praying each night not only

not to die



but to wake up and discover

what I'd always known, myself

an alien with this second sight,



the world a book

of such briation I could see

what I needed. And I needed



this, this music, whosever it was,

this elsewhere

I pulled from its sleeve and spun



beneath the needle, this orchestra

crash, this rush, this planet rocked

with lasers



like the blasts we hammered

out of high-tension wires,



a strange music at last

near at hand.



Each one was a rock taking off,

not landing, which is what



I prayed against each night

the shells flashed

on the army range a few hills distant



which we knew would be

among the first to go if

the Russians struck,



everything we knew turned first

to light and then to ash...



I can hear it now, lightning crack

in the Memphis channel,



hit me, in Bambaataaa's sping,

Bambaataa's beat, the shock,



of doors opening between the stars,



of someone reaching

down, George Clinton or Jesus

Christ, someone reaching up,



Sun Ra's Rock #9 taking off

for Venus,



anywhere but this before

the radiation, mutation

came down. I needed this,



this liberatino music

I'd spin each night and sometimes

cut the sound to listen



to the needle rattle in the groove,

a cicada in its shell,

waiting for wings to unfold,



four dollars of polyrhythm,

of syncopation



to begin to hear

myself over the drawl of home



and step to the mall-fountain

rap battles my friend coaxed me into,



teaching me

to fold a sentence

to a hawk, a panther,

a rattlesnake, a rocket,

an origami star,



Southside hicks against

boys from Litchfield

and Tuscaloosa Ave



I might see

in a parking lot

pulling their moms to the curb



then dialing up the beat

where we'd catch

each other's bob, a byword



we needed to call across

the lines the county drew around us.



We had so much

behind us, the history



we were told we shouldn't

name, stir up, remember,

so much silence



we needed to break. Alone

and then together and then

alone again, because they told us



we were young

and we should turn that noise down,



we slid the discs off our fingers

until even the ridges of our prints

felt musical.



Dap is the vibe passing

hand to hand, hand to pen,

pen rolling like the needle



over the dark



then pulling back to spin

free again, so



fingerprints give up

their songs,



and there in the dust

of having met, Birmingham

drifts with Philly, New York

with New Orleans.



Each note popos like lightning

in the broadcast air,



like Robert Johnson's calloused

palps on the steel



as he learned his graveyard music

in a ghost town in Alabama

while looking up at the stars.



Take this then

and spin it, pulling history

back against itself until



you find the star-calling riff

and everything falls



and elsewhere gives way

to where and we don't have to

look away again.



I fold the line now,

my inked fingers leaving

their rings here where



you will have to peel the tape

to open the disc

of night to set it reeling,



in its grooves the plosive novas

of dust, the afterwards of skin

dropping



new beats between

the ones we already know.