http://youtube.com/watch?v=faRUm2dacK0 instead of just reading, you can watch me perform this poem, there are also other talented poets reading...enjoy
Rusty cowbells clang like trash cans on collection day.
Rattling the serpent’s tale.
Telling stories of my family, of our history.
A plague of teenage mothers.
It spreads like a forest fire.
“No one wants to close their legs”
Gyration; Music is my people.
Bang, Bang, Bang!
Bang on her goat skin drum.
Lisa’s again in the street; she bounces to the music;
Full round caramel breasts bounce along.
Bleachers bleating to her beat.
While the serpent slithers near her feet.
Gyration; Music is my people.
Play the new songs,
“Ghost move, Belly Yuck”
“Anudda back yad pa-tee”
as dark as nightmares.
A new serpent stares.
He’ll trick her to perform to a new tune.
Gyration; Music is my people.
Heart racing, loud panting, music playing…
“I have a hang over,”
from those damned rusty cowbells.
She made her first child to the music of K.B.
Sweating in a back seat of the stranger’s ride
Lisa “Belly Yucks” as the serpents slides inside.
Gyration; Music is my people.
Music rattled the serpent’s tail;
now she continues our family tradition.
Anudda
Teenage mother.
Gyration; Music is my people.
©copyright Tia L. Clarke 2007
2 comments:
Shorty, Still Standing, I neglected to tell you, tlc, how very cool a remark this is. I suppose you allude here to Pintard's Still Standing.Shorty wears it even more appropriately, more interestingly.
Still standing is also a line in a poem I love, by another poet I love, William Stanley Merwin. Will share if I can ever locate it again.
Music Is My People though, what is this an allusion to? It calls to mind, Music Is My Mistress, the autobiography of Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington.I read it about a decade ago. what a life-changing event reading that book was.
And what of Margaret walker? Your poem's title calls to mind a poem of hers as well, "For My People". Following is a link to it. It's wonderful too!
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/354.html
I haven't alluded to anything. I was inspired by our music and the sexual innuendos in so many of the songs. But I do not make poems of other poems, thus alluding. I am not an allusionist. I am a poet.
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