The Revolution Will Not Be Cat Called, a poem by Robert Lashley
“If the Black world is lost, if our love world ain’t love,
if the unheard, unshaken Black word is freedom,
where is the world you knead off our skulls?”
Poetry by Robert Lashley
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*parts of this poem are influenced by T.S Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”
I.
“Black men, she says, are shouting praises about her controversial
appraisal of black women. The entire community will get a chance
to hear that appraisal tonight when Ali speaks at the Paramount
Theatre at 8 o’clock. ‘Her truth is so to the point that a lot of black
women don’t see how they can effectively address some of the issues,’
said Curt Smith of Seattle.”
– “Shahrazad Ali Points Finger at Black Women —
Controversial Author to Speak at Paramount Theatre
Tonight,” Seattle Times, October 3rd, 1990
Nation time is always on a workday.
The fantasies of prodigals crowd
bus stop assignments; the comings
of judgment over penciled inventories,
with shrapnel and flank used by ankhs
in wars that they mistook as revolutions.
Revolutionaries start where no drivers see.
The infirmed glory of the five percent hour
is a Byzantium for the dumb and blind.
Holy gestures strut and proclaim the vein
of the third eyes’ transitory power.
Men smush their heads in oil and ash
as the bus goes by green water.
Nouns and verbs, they twist your face
as the bus goes by the green water.
And pray to the driver to have mercy on us.
And pray for the stops when men may forget
the altars where the saved may see us,
the fire of the valley of the double seat,
the parabolist’s floor in the minutes and hours
where the men start to look for calves,
where those who are dead can’t come alive again
and those alive see nothing but harlots.
Pray! Pray, homeboy! Pray for the quiet!
Matters much discussed and little explained
are sermons for prayers too answered,
are judgment hands laid too heavy upon us.
Pray! Pray for calm.
II.
“Don’t you move your goddamn ass to Seattle, Glennis. Niggas filled
up the paramount to hear somebody say I should get my ass kicked.
Niggas filled up the paramount to hear somebody say I should get
my ass kicked. Niggas filled up the goddamn paramount to hear
somebody say I should get my ass kicked.”
– Big Momma, October 4th, 1990
Buses stop where no gates swing,
where no stars burn or trumpets sound,
where no plagues or woes cause
agony but to those without two bucks.
Three OG’s and thirty-three elders sat under
the poster of Pierce evergreens.
Inside cool rain, the northern signifiers
(king boys transfixed by the paramount word)
fixate on hips, lips, and licks,
fixate on their grinders of humans into dreams,
their negatives a piecemeal of the blues,
their negative in endless city phantasms
of gods and demons, immobile and fluid.
Shall our bones live? Shall our bones live?
And that which had been contained by the stop changes
starts to speak and speak and speak.
The ankh boys make their altar calls
in binary two steps with love and death.
My muse!
My mystery lady!
My goddess creature!
Come drink me of your loveliness.
Be my virgin and labor for me and serve as Queen
of my bus.
Bus mirrors are filled with convex angels
in their descents to Hades’ dream kingdom.
C’mon baby
What’s wrong, bitch
Goddesses are defrocked in Athena’s back seats.
Bitch
Ho
Cunt Dyke
Bitch Ho
Bitch
The posterity of the singles bar
and the nation’s guided wants
let a madness of bones free near the home stop.
Bitch
Bitch
Bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch
Oh, my niggas what have we done to thee?
We
who walk between the violent and the violets,
who walk between the various ranks
of gilded cages,
strangling veils, and rings inversed
in the colonnades of golden pedestals
singing of survival things
among the ignorance and knowledge of man’s eternal dolor.
Who moves among the brothers as they crept?
Who makes strong the shut-in, hiding, elusive?
Make strong the door and the lock key.
Make strong our new verses of ancient freedoms,
our unseen vision in your future dreams
while jeweled macho men signify our hearses.
Neighbor sisters who spread sage in black and blue
sigh and speak no words.
Garden mothers in the creases of shadows
sigh and speak no words.
Flaked gods flail as ghetto birds sing down
in the land of our sectioned exile.
Oh, my niggas what have we done to thee?
Will your Black god pray for those who offended them?
Those terrified of his mirror but who cannot surrender
on the cliffs above his black rock.
Oh, my niggas, what have we done to thee?
If the Black world is lost, if our love world ain’t love,
if the unheard, unshaken Black word is freedom,
where is the world you knead off our skulls?
Where will your Black god minister to those
who walk in his darkness?
Those who are torn between season and the season of bills,
time and time of the rent man,
the hour and the hour of little niggas at the kitchen,
who will not go away yet cannot pray to you,
for your miracles have hollowed are eyes.
III.
Although I cannot hope to rest again.
Although I cannot hope.
Although I cannot hope rest from
wavering between street prophets,
lost boys tweaking in the corner store.
In the moving traps of a hundred hero’s journeys,
in schizoid twilight between father and motherlands,
Sisters of silences, calm and distressed
will not make their bodies men's holy Sepulchre
will not tear and make whole their sense of the divine
while waiting for the 7:12 stop
will not make roses out of memory and forgetfulness
in the lockers’ of man-children's fields.
The 27 is not the garden, nor the tree of Lebanon
it is the bus we take to go to work.
Ferries – visible and non – cross on Salish.
Third eye windows dance with suburb doors.
Men speak of corralling and leading in the smoke
while the witches must pay their bills.
We are mothers, boy, but we are not Mary.
The beige fog stiffens among the noises.
The lilacs are masked, and the church bells echo,
and the tired spirit quickens to a rest
on the 27 bus.
It quickens to forget the blood fight
and the prodded symbol,
the Hotep forms and the ivory gates
in a window space to rest.
We are mothers boy, but we are not Mary.
The ghetto nerd’s tension
is between dying and re-birth,
the distance from solitude where all tribes cross
between the murked and the green meridian
where voices shaken from wild mouths
drift away.
We are mothers, boy, but we are not Mary.
To suffer one’s self is to mock nationhood.
To care and to not care as people run to their rocks.
To suffer one’s self is to be separated
by the dividing lines from the corner to the sea.
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Header image courtesy of Tim Okamura. To view his Artist Feature, go here.
Robert Lashley is a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. Robert Lashley has had work published in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, and The Cascadia Review. His poetry was also featured in such anthologies as Many Trails to The Summitt, Foot Bridge Above The Falls, Get Lit, Make It True, and It Was Written. His previous books include THE HOMEBOY SONGS (Small Doggies Press, 2014), and UP SOUTH (Small Doggies Press, 2017). His next book THE GREEN RIVER VALLEY, is forthcoming from Blue Cactus Press on June 17th, 2021.
