I Make Promises Before I Dream by Tongo Eisen-Martin

I Make Promises Before I Dream

No unclaimed, cremated mothers this year

Nor collateral white skin

No mothers folding clothes to a corporate park preamble

No sons singing under the bright lights of a lumber yard

Quantum reaganomics and the tap steps of turning on a friend

New York trophy parts among

            the limbs of decent people

                       Being an enraged artist is like

                       entering a room and not knowing what to get high off of

My formative symbols/My upbringing flying to an agent’s ears

                                                                                                          I might as well be an activist

Called my girlfriend and described

All the bottles segregationist had thrown at me that day

Described recent blues sites and soothing precautions

I feared for my poetry

                                                                                           

You have to make art every once in a while

            While in the company of sell-outs

            Accountant books in deified bulk

            Or while waiting for a girl under a modern chandelier

                                               

                                                           Or in your last lobby as a wanderer

The prison foot-races the museum

                                                                                                                        My instrument ends

                        I mean, what is a calendar to the slave?

                                               Also, what is a crystal prism?

                                                                                                                    “He bought this bullet,

bought its flight

then bought two more”