I’m happy to announce that my first poetry collection, The Blackened Blues, is available wherever you buy books (yes, *wherever*, so you don’t have to put more money in Rocket Man’s pocket; you can go directly to my publisher, Finishing Line Press, or support my pals (and 1455 partners) at D.C.’s The Potter’s House).
THE BLACKENED BLUES is part of a large and ongoing project that discusses (and celebrates) some of the author’s personal heroes who remain far less celebrated than they deserve to be. As it happens, many of them are musicians, hampered in various ways by discrimination, ranging from old fashioned racism to institutional and cultural indifference. Though there’s an elegiac sadness suffusing these poems, there’s also acknowledgment of defiant genius: they fought their battles bravely, in their art and in their lives. This collection seeks to capture something (or, hopefully, more than a few things) essential about their lives, bearing witness while also paying homage.
I’d like to introduce the collection, one poem at a time (in the order they appear in the book), and tell a little bit about the inspiration for each, by way of explanation and in tribute.
Next up is “Bill Cosby’s Blindness,” which should require little introduction or elaboration.
Bill Cosby’s Blindness
It’s like the old joke about men having two brains,
or whatever ways male impulse and privilege have
forever been defined or denied, or else amalgamated.
He had appetites, certain types have always said,
whenever they wish to whitewash unsavory deeds
done in the disservice of others, without recourse.
Savor their gift, they also say, because nothing else
matters in the end, which is why wives and partners
and conquests are often, at best, asterisks in obituaries.
His mind, his heart, his art, all in the right place, right?
It was just his brain (you know which one) obliging him
to act in ways contrary to those better angels—and alibis.
Do what I say, not what I do is, of course, always there:
the script spoken during unfortunate aftermaths; it’s hard
on men who are nothing if not instinctual beings—by design.
A TV street preacher using sit-coms and stand-up routines,
you caught so many flies in your filthy web, not man enough
to seduce or enthrall, but waylay, by divine wrong, your prey.
Not unlike a billionaire hustler hiding behind golden gates,
you cast subtle aspersions and got grandiloquent on
a congregation quick with its wallets and magnanimity.
Even while you whined about pound cakes and shilled
pudding pops, you refilled prescriptions, cheese for traps
you served in tainted cocktails: they drank and you defiled.
In the land of the blind, a man with no eyesight is king, or…
some shit like that; is this all you have to offer, at long last,
as you parade your pique, a penultimate, sorry performance?
Cast the first stone, some still say, despite everything
we’ve heard and seen from so many he tried to silence,
He’s America’s Dad, and look how his wife stands by him!
The same logical pretzels good masters employed, pretending
they were men of God with little ladies they were raising to rule
the world, even as they cleaned up dirty deeds and dirty drawers.
Side action’s the collateral damage of men with desires & history’s
routinely reconciled the ways our cultural heroes have victimized
the voiceless while they got busy, ardently reshaping our realities.
Hey Dr. Huxtable, at any point did it occur that you’d become Everything
you claimed to despise, but worse? Your trespasses all empowered
by prestige—and what only those with lost souls dare call prerogative?
