Sunday Poetry: Yusef Komunyakaa

This is my manifesto. Komunyakaa is ill, in a good way. Anyway, this is what I try to do when I write. I fail enough to know how difficult it is. Hope you guys enjoy this one.

Safe Subjects

by Yusef Komunyakaa

How can love heal

the mouth shut this way?

Say something worth breath.

Let is surface, recapitulate

how fat leeches press down gently

on the sex goddesses eyelids.

Let truth have its way with us

like a fishhook holds

to life, holds dearly to nothing

worth say -pull it out,

bringing with it hard facts,

knowledge that the find underbone

of hope is also attached

to inner self, underneath it all.

Undress. No don't be afraid

even to get Satan mixed up in this

acknowledgment of thorns:

meaning there's madness

in the sperm, in the egg,

fear breathing in its blood sac,

true accounts not so easily

written off the sad book.

Say something about pomegranates.

Say something about real love.

Yes, true love -more than

parted lips, than parted legs

in sorrow's darkroom of potash

& blues. Let the brain stumble

from its hiding place, from its cell block,

to the edge of oblivion

to come to itself, sharp-tongued

as a boar's grin in summer moss

where a vision rides the back

of God, at this masquerade.

Redemptive as a straight razor

against a jugular vein -

unacknowledged & unforgiven.

It's truth we're after here,

hurting for, out in the streets

where my brothers kill each other,

each other's daughters & guardian angels

in the opera of dead on arrival.

Say something that resuscitates

us, behind the masks, 

as we stumble off into neon lights

to loveless beds & a second skin

of loneliness. Something political as dust

& earthworms at work in the temple

of greed & mildew, where bowed lamps

cast down shadows like blueprints of graves.

Say something for us who can't believe

in the creed of nightshade.

Yes, say something to us dreamers

who decode the message of dirt

between ancient floor boards

as black widow spiders

lay translucent eggs

in the skull of a dead mole

under a dogwood in full bloom.