LITERARY

by Malik

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Each year has about 365 sunrises, mornings, afternoons, evenings, sunsets and

nights, right? Each day has 24 hours. So, each year we archive about 8,760 hours

of experiences (sleep and daydreams included). 60 minutes to an hour, right?

That’s 525,600 minutes of occurrences annually. 60 seconds to every minute, right?

So, every year we gain about 31,536,000 seconds of pure proof. Now, there’s

1,000 milliseconds in every second, right? So, each year we’re archiving

31,536,000,000 milliseconds of encounters in our minds (blackouts included). No

wonder it’s so difficult sifting through all that information just to achieve one sharp

relevant idea.

 Mon café avec Breton

Mon café, whose hair is a celestial cloud

Whose thoughts are honest conceits

Whose waist is an event horizon

Whose waist is the waist of an elephant prostrating before a wooly mammoth

Whose mouth is the dark matter between Andromeda and Cygnus A

Whose teeth leave Sam Gilliam streaks staining my enamel

Whose tongue is Choctaw leather

Whose tongue is jet fuel

The tongue of a sugar cane Hoodoo doll with full-sized phosphorescent fish eyes

Whose eyebrows are stovetop flames on low

Mon café, whose temples are humid juke joints in Arkansas

With wise-wood windows sweating moonshine

Mon café, whose shoulders are Himalya’s sweat

Are streams that sing from jaguar pupils to condor wings over vivid valleys

Mon café, whose russet wrist has never known watches

Whose fingers are maracas rattling in unison with my pulse

Whose fingers are tobacco stems

Mon café, with armpits full of guerilla ears and Louisiana swamp moss

As Beauford sings them blues

That are bunkers full of rusted weapons and underground hide-outs for North Star chasers

Whose arms are of swamp gods and warrior ghosts desperately resisting the colonies

Whose arms are smokey topaz lakes

Whose legs are scorched constellations

For the deceptive quest of any healing being, invisible or not

Mon café, whose calves are stained with pinto bean blood and sorcerer’s sap

Whose feet are mud’s blood

Taupe toenails made of chestnut eyed children who swam in lava, laughing

Mon café, whose neck is amber bubbles disappearing on the stagnant surface

Whose throat is the keeper of Valley Gods

Initiating Seekers in the cardboard brothel of Rhea each blood moon

Mon café, whose chest is the garnet galaxy

And full of Turritopsis nutricula

And sard codices of immortality

Mon café, whose torso is a laughing panther chewing wet planets

Whose swollen stomach is a coconut cracking from inner lightning

Is about to Amma

Mon café, with Ibis eyes helixing in the vortex

With a back full of preserved lotus pods

And peacock feathers, fanning

Mon café, whose sixth chakra is labradorite and wet sand

And of steam that swirls through the fingers of someone who has just decided to lindy-hop

Mon café, with thighs of an ostrich

That are strong as keels

And all acceleration

Mon café, whose aft is astrology and horoscopes

Whose aft is the dark side of Neptune in autumn

Mon café, whose morning sex conjures the morning star

An adrenaline-mine-refusing restraint

With the sex of baseball mitts from the ’20s as that petite Absinthe lady winks

Mon café, with the sex of Ovid’s lake

Mon café, with mosaic eyes full of Grenada’s gypsies doing duende dances in bubbling tar

With eyes that are obsidian cloaks and Moorish magnets

With eyes of Ixchel

With eyes full of night skies drinking nebulas

Mon café, with eyes that are not colonial classrooms critiquing colonial constructions

Mon café with no sugar, no milk, no nothing, just black.

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Something about that sort of history encourages
you to be ashamed of the progress we haven’t made

Something about those documentaries forces
you to avoid admitting it was all for an even crueler future

Something in thinking about any of it makes you wish
you had studied space travel because time machines obviously haven’t worked, yet.

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The struggle within their bodies to make a

substantial contribution to the vast narrative and

tradition of

decisions & actions takes its toll.

About the Poet

Malik Crumpler is a poet, rapper, composer, editor, and teacher originally from Oakland, California. For 12 years Malik lived in NYC where he received an MFA in Creative Writing from LIU, Brooklyn he currently lives in Paris, France where he is the co-poetry editor/ co-host with Paris Lit Up,  editor-at-large of The Opiate and curator for Poets Live, “The Rest Is Now (a poetry EP)” is Malik’s most recent Poetry offering published by The Isolation Collection.  photo credit: Scott Benedict