print previewback RICKEY LAURENTIIS
Lord and Chariot
I say the dead done caught me in a special knot
and lured, and dragged me to the interior.
I say his face is strange here, a moment cruel
but not without its silk, its earned sadness.
He asks me to touch it, so I touch it. No light
can blossom here I know, as my bones know.
~
Why ask me who I am. Who really knows
the place of my future? I’m his, or I’m not—
I’m black, or black was made me. The light
turns the cane a wanted color. I walk its interior.
There are only grasses here, only sadness.
I pick one. I tear it. I think to be free is to be cruel.
~
He says the dead are versions of himself: little ulcers,
little cruel insurgencies. He says, Know
that I’m master here, my boy, my little sadness.
There is no riot. (Riot.) Or fear. (Fear.) Bought, knotted,
I’m the boy in the cane field that’s his, the air, or
I’m his whip that stirred the air, scarred the light.
~
My back is the touch of violence. Like light,
my blood trills. I kneel. I ooze. Cruel
underworld, I freeze in your interior—
Though I’m called queen. I lie at his waist. I know
the true color of his loved-on skin. I say it’s white, not
purity. I say that my strength is my sadness.
~
To be free, I think, like him, is a sadness—
Nothing at all. But to be bold, to light
a panic, to tear a cage of cane by blade is not
freedom, either. The cane grows back. Cruel—
Can’t you see it’s the one word I know? Even my bones know
this language, and moan it deep in their interior.
~
I say the dead done left me, stranded, at the interior,
which is this stranger’s face, his sprawling sadness.
I say any blade in my hand is just my hand, and I know
its weight exactly, the lifts of its bite. O light:
sweet molestation in the fields. One lord. One chariot. Cruel
silk, I’m a boy in love. Let the dead bury their dead. 
Lord and Chariot
Writing an Elegy
Mood for Love
Epitaph on a Stone