For Henry Dumas - 1934-1968 - Poem

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by George Elliott Clarke

a la maniere de Cheney-Coker

Ever since a white cop's bullet labeled you

the usual, dangerous nigger-

I mean, a poet-

and snuffed you out blasphemously

on that Gotham City subway stage,

your brain blood falling from your mouth

like holy roses from barbed-wire brambles,

your remains--a few brutal, hurting poems-

continue to leak out acid that blinds

snow-faced critics and chews away their mouths.

Your words burn hotter than the capitalists' napalm.

And you flowered from a gold-wombed mother;

you were her long blues and her lullaby;

you balladized Turner, Tubman, and Malcolm X;

you became fire-eyed due to your heart's lava-

because of bones of angels incinerated in alleys,

because of Canadian Club bootleg molotov cocktails,

because of the torn-up corpses of dreamers who trusted white cops.

Your ink was fiery indigo tapped from the veins

of black folk chopped down like cane in fields

and black folk cut down like sunflowers in slums.

You were so true, you made truth truer.

Natural Nazis, the cops lied about what they did,

about how they burgundied your black skin with blood.

They thought it was their blood,

that you were some slave they could slay like their fathers did,

with impunity, with immunity.

They winked and smiled at their homicide-

like crude animals that eat their own feces

or soil their own mothers' corpses.

They still creep and slither like vermin,

sodomize infants in dumpsters,

spray insecticide at the beetling sun.

They shall die with your poems pummeling

their skulls, gross pus oozing out their mouths,

their eyes shitting light.

II. vii

Pathetic, when opened up,

his pitiful guts spilling free,

Mishima stank in his putrid,

squalid dying, and his whimpers

lacerated his throat

with sword-like gasps and sighs,

and fatigue of sex came to him,

his entrails in his hands,

and his blood messing up the floor,

the detritus of drink in his bowels

emptying on the floor,

and shit jellying in his nostrils,

his own shit, and his eyes fixed

on his lover's face, glossy with love,

or with fear,

as when he crouched between that boy's legs,

savored his taste of mushrooms and beer,

and dreamt of cannon's bel canto,

the beautiful deaths of butterflies,

cherry blossoms, kamikaze,

the agitated, salacious fire

of Poetry in the gut.

Abominable, abominable,

the brain splintering with dreams,

the viscera coming out

like stuffing,

or a kind of vomit,

the black-ink blood scrawling

pornography over the floor,

the stink more real than any imagination

but a pig's imagination,

and he is like a stuck pig,

but not squealing,

his bowels now wobbles of sausage,

his face dewy with paste-like pallor,

his last manuscript an a priori opera,

and his terminal thought sounding

awfully, archly, like Puccini,

Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio.

George Elliott Clarke taught in the Department of English at Duke University from 1994 to 1999. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His production credits include a libretto, a screenplay, and two plays, and he is the author of several books of poetry, including Beatrice Chancy, a verse-tragedy published by Polestar Books this year.