Ussin, or America’s Grammar Book Penumbra
~after Hortense J. Spillers & Cheryl I. Harris
The love worship of whiteness is the root of all evil, & you,
conspiratorial spiritati who never rue crimes you should
atone, always ride me breathless with guilt for offenses
of no consequence. You congregate random sequences
of cash & ass & divine it God capital, default on all
the songs I loaned you in the cotton field, behind
the shed, deep within the trapdoors of our skin, finally
down around our haunches, balls of our feet ginning
with each thrust. You could not sing in tune if your lies
cost you as much as you charge ussin for wailing so well
against your flesh hunger. Find posers who look like you
who parrot me to pay more than you & they know
you’re worth, then come inside me & my saintees’
cuzzins’ mamanem’s backdoors crying wolf.
What’s in my neighborhood?
All the names that all who matter know. How to sift
its secrets without your vanity overshadowing,
quantified to scale zhuzh up the gestalt of your fungi
& fury. The optics say blackness is fungible, all my colors
mingled; whiteness is reds, blues, & envy sporing,
sparring. Multiply our backs’ grass-slick blood caking
your nails times the moans inside our song (in my mouth).
Divide all the nominal interest that’s fit to prick the paltry print
’tween your thighs, thumping ’gainst the wallets made from
ussin hides, & still it would not suffice enough to say: Thou
doth project too much. Now, may your bankrupt souls soles
recoil. May your nightmares’ soundtrack be ussin laughter,
ussin sashay, ussin anima unfurled. Write all the checks
your assets wouldacouldshoulda cashed last century &
look away, look away, look away …
