Three Poems — Tongo Eisen Martin
Kick Drum Only
All street life to a certain extent starts fair
Sometimes with a spiritual memory even
Predawn soul-clap/ your father dying even
Maybe I’ve pushed the city too far
My sensitivities to landfill districting and minstrel whistles/
White supremacist graffiti on westbound rail guards
-all overcome and reauthored
The garbage is growing voices
Condensed Marxism
modal gangsterism for a warrior-depressive
Underpass in my pocket
because I am a deity
or decent bid on the Panther name
revolutionary violence that chose its own protagonists
or muted stage of genius
A merciful Marxism
Disquieted home life
Or metaphor for relaxing next to a person
Who is relaxing next to a gun
I stare at my father for a few seconds
Then return to my upbringing
Return to the souls of Ohio Black folks
Revolution is damn near pagan at this point
You know what the clown wants? The respect of the ant.
Wants a pen cap full of bullets
Wants to see their ancestors in broad daylight
I am not tired of these rooms; just tired of the world that give them a relativity
My only change of clothes prosecuted
The government has finally learned how to write poems
shoot-outs that briefly align…
that make up a parable
white bodies are paid well, I posit
do white men actually even have leaders?
all white people are white men
white men will only ever be metaphors
all I do is practice, Lord
A rat pictures a river
Can almost taste the racial divide
Can almost roll a family member’s head into a city hall legislative chamber
Knows who in this good book will fly
I have decided not to talk out of anger ever again, Lord
Met my wife at the same time I met new audience members for our pain
We passed each other cigarettes and watched cops win
A city gone uniquely linear
Harlem of the West due a true universe
“I will always remember you in fancy clothes,” my wife said
so here I sit… twisting in silk ideation
My rifle made of tar
My targets made of an honest language
This San Francisco poetry is how God knows that it is me whining
Writing among the lesser-respected wolves
Lesser-observed militarization
Dixie-less prison bookkeeping/I mean the California gray-coats are coming
lynch mob gossip and bourgeois debt collection
I mean, it’s tempting to change professions mid-poem
in a Chicago briefing, a white sergeant saying, “blank slate for all of us after this Black organizer is dead.”
standard academics toasting two-buck wine at the tank parade
bay of nothing, Lord
nuclear cobblestones, gunline athleticism
and the last of the inherited asthma
children given white dolls to play with and fear
facial expressions borrowed from rich people’s shoe strings
I can hear hate
And teach hate
And call tools by people names
And name people dead to themselves
no one getting naturalized except federal agents soon
carving the equator into throats soon
I’m sorry to make you relive all of this, Lord
pre-dawn monarchy
friends putting up politician posters then snorting the remainder of the paste
minstrel scripts shoveled into the walls by their elders
my children sharpening quarters on the city’s edge
For these audiences
I project myself into a ghost like state
For these gangsters, I do the same
every now and then, we take a nervous look east
Sleep becomes Christ
Sleep starts growing a racial identity
do you ever spiral, Lord?
has the gang-age betrayed us?
be patient with my poems, Lord
So much pain
there is a point to crime…
There has to be if race traitors come with it
Lord, is that my revolver in your hand?
Better presidents than these have yawned at cages
Have called us holy slaves
Filled the school libraries with cop documentaries
Baby, I don’t have money for food
I have no present moment at all
/
I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money
I go to the railroad tracks
And follow them to the station of my enemies
A cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mugshot negative
All over the united states, there are
Toddlers in the rock
I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket
And why blood agreements mean a lot
And why I get shot back at
I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway
White skin tattooed on my right forearm
Ricochet sewage near where I collapsed
into a rat-infested manhood
My new existence as living graffiti
In the kitchen with
a lot of gun cylinders to hack up
House of God in part
No cops in part
My body brings down the Christmas
The new bullets pray over blankets made from old bullets
Pray over the 28th hour’s next beauty mark
Extrajudicial confederate statue restoration
the waist band before the next protest poster
By the way,
Time is not an illusion, your honor
I will return in a few whirlwinds
I will save your desk for last
You are witty, your honor
You’re moving money again, your honor
It is only raining one thing: non-white cops
And prison guard shadows
Reminding me of
Spoiled milk floating on an oil spill
A neighborhood making a lot of fuss over its demise
A new lake for a Black Panther Party
Malcom X’s ballroom jacket slung over my son’s shoulders
Pharmacy doors mid-slide
The figment of village
a noon noose to a new white preacher
Wiretaps in the discount kitchen tile
-All in an abstract painting of a president
Bought slavers some time, didn’t it?
The tantric screeches of military bolts and Election-Tuesday cars
A cold-blooded study in leg irons
Leg irons in tornado shelters
Leg irons inside your body
Proof that some white people have actually fondled nooses
That sundown couples
made their vows of love over
opaque peach plastic
and bolt action audiences
Man, the Medgar Evers-second is definitely my favorite law of science
Fondled news clippings and primitive Methodists
My arm changes imperialisms
Simple policing vs. Structural frenzies
Elementary school script vs. Even whiter white spectrums
Artless bleeding and
the challenge of watching civilians think
“terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy…beg for settler polity”
“I am going to go ahead and sharpen these kids’ heads into arrows myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crests.”
Modern fans of war
What with their t-shirt poems
And t-shirt guilt
And me, having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus,
I have no choice but to read the city walls for signs of my life
/
The Chicago Prairie Fire
First, I must apologize to the souls of the house
I am wearing the cheek bones of the mask only
Pill bottle, my name is yours
Name tagged on the side of a factory of wrists
Teeth of the mask now
Back of the head of the mask now
New phase of anti-anthropomorphism fending for real faces
Stuck with one of those cultures that believes I chose this family
I am not creative
Just the silliest of the revolutionaries
My blood drying on
my only jacket
just as God got playful
the police state’s psychic middlemen
Evangelizing for the creation of an un-masses
An un-Medgar
Blood of a lamb less racialized
or awesome prison sentence
Good God
Elder-abuse hired for the low
dog eat genius
Right angle made between a point
On a Louisiana plantation
And 5-year old’s rubber ball
3 feet high and falling
like a deportee plane
to complete my interpretation
(of garden variety genocide)
I am small talk
about loving your enemies
A little more realistically
About paper tigers
And also gold…
I need my left hand back
I broke my neck on the piano keys
Found paradise in a fistfight
Maybe I should check into the Cuba line
Watching the universe’s last metronomes
some call Black Jacobins
Just wait…
These religions will start resigning in a decade or two
Some colorfully
Some transactional-ly
In a cotton gothic society
Class betrayal gone glassless/ I mean ironically/ my window started fogging over too
Wondering which Haiti will get me through this winter
Which poem houses souls
Which socialist breakthroughs
Breakthroughs like ten steps back
Then finally stillness
Stillness
Then stillness among families
a John Brown biography takes a bow
I’m up next to introduce Prosser to Monk
I remember childhood
Remember the word “Childhood” being a beginning
Scribbling on an amazing grace
I rented this body from some circumference of slavery
Remember being kicked out of the Midwest
Strange fruit theater
Lithium and circuses
Likeminded stomachs
The ruling class blessing their blank checks with levy foam…
with opioid tea
Sentient dollar bills yelling to each other pocket to pocket
Cello stands in the precinct for accompanying counterrevolutionaries
My mother raised me with a simple pain
A poet loses his mind, you know, like the room has weather
Or first-girlfriend gravity
Police-knock gravity
Mind-game gravity
Or revolution languishing behind
The sugar in my good friend’s mind
“The difference between me and you
Is that the madness
Wants me forever”
A pair of apartments
Defining both my family
And political composure
Books behind my back
Bail money paved into the streets
Playing:
Euphoria
Euphoria
Cliché
Bracing for the medicine’s recoil
Sharing a dirty deli sandwich with my friends
Black Jacobins
Underground topography
Or grandmother’s hands
Psychology of the mask now
Teeth of the mask again
—
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book of poems, Someone’s Dead Already was nominated for a California Book Award.
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Three Poems — Tongo
Kick Drum Only
All street life to a certain extent starts fair
Sometimes with a spiritual memory even
Predawn soul-clap/ your father dying even
Maybe I’ve pushed the city too far
My sensitivities to landfill districting and minstrel whistles/
White supremacist graffiti on westbound rail guards
-all overcome and reauthored
The garbage is growing voices
Condensed Marxism
modal gangsterism for a warrior-depressive
Underpass in my pocket
because I am a deity
or decent bid on the Panther name
revolutionary violence that chose its own protagonists
or muted stage of genius
A merciful Marxism
Disquieted home life
Or metaphor for relaxing next to a person
Who is relaxing next to a gun
I stare at my father for a few seconds
Then return to my upbringing
Return to the souls of Ohio Black folks
Revolution is damn near pagan at this point
You know what the clown wants? The respect of the ant.
Wants a pen cap full of bullets
Wants to see their ancestors in broad daylight
I am not tired of these rooms; just tired of the world that give them a relativity
My only change of clothes prosecuted
The government has finally learned how to write poems
shoot-outs that briefly align…
that make up a parable
white bodies are paid well, I posit
do white men actually even have leaders?
all white people are white men
white men will only ever be metaphors
all I do is practice, Lord
A rat pictures a river
Can almost taste the racial divide
Can almost roll a family member’s head into a city hall legislative chamber
Knows who in this good book will fly
I have decided not to talk out of anger ever again, Lord
Met my wife at the same time I met new audience members for our pain
We passed each other cigarettes and watched cops win
A city gone uniquely linear
Harlem of the West due a true universe
“I will always remember you in fancy clothes,” my wife said
so here I sit… twisting in silk ideation
My rifle made of tar
My targets made of an honest language
This San Francisco poetry is how God knows that it is me whining
Writing among the lesser-respected wolves
Lesser-observed militarization
Dixie-less prison bookkeeping/I mean the California gray-coats are coming
lynch mob gossip and bourgeois debt collection
I mean, it’s tempting to change professions mid-poem
in a Chicago briefing, a white sergeant saying, “blank slate for all of us after this Black organizer is dead.”
standard academics toasting two-buck wine at the tank parade
bay of nothing, Lord
nuclear cobblestones, gunline athleticism
and the last of the inherited asthma
children given white dolls to play with and fear
facial expressions borrowed from rich people’s shoe strings
I can hear hate
And teach hate
And call tools by people names
And name people dead to themselves
no one getting naturalized except federal agents soon
carving the equator into throats soon
I’m sorry to make you relive all of this, Lord
pre-dawn monarchy
friends putting up politician posters then snorting the remainder of the paste
minstrel scripts shoveled into the walls by their elders
my children sharpening quarters on the city’s edge
For these audiences
I project myself into a ghost like state
For these gangsters, I do the same
every now and then, we take a nervous look east
Sleep becomes Christ
Sleep starts growing a racial identity
do you ever spiral, Lord?
has the gang-age betrayed us?
be patient with my poems, Lord
So much pain
there is a point to crime…
There has to be if race traitors come with it
Lord, is that my revolver in your hand?
Better presidents than these have yawned at cages
Have called us holy slaves
Filled the school libraries with cop documentaries
Baby, I don’t have money for food
I have no present moment at all
/
I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money
I go to the railroad tracks
And follow them to the station of my enemies
A cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mugshot negative
All over the united states, there are
Toddlers in the rock
I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket
And why blood agreements mean a lot
And why I get shot back at
I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway
White skin tattooed on my right forearm
Ricochet sewage near where I collapsed
into a rat-infested manhood
My new existence as living graffiti
In the kitchen with
a lot of gun cylinders to hack up
House of God in part
No cops in part
My body brings down the Christmas
The new bullets pray over blankets made from old bullets
Pray over the 28th hour’s next beauty mark
Extrajudicial confederate statue restoration
the waist band before the next protest poster
By the way,
Time is not an illusion, your honor
I will return in a few whirlwinds
I will save your desk for last
You are witty, your honor
You’re moving money again, your honor
It is only raining one thing: non-white cops
And prison guard shadows
Reminding me of
Spoiled milk floating on an oil spill
A neighborhood making a lot of fuss over its demise
A new lake for a Black Panther Party
Malcom X’s ballroom jacket slung over my son’s shoulders
Pharmacy doors mid-slide
The figment of village
a noon noose to a new white preacher
Wiretaps in the discount kitchen tile
-All in an abstract painting of a president
Bought slavers some time, didn’t it?
The tantric screeches of military bolts and Election-Tuesday cars
A cold-blooded study in leg irons
Leg irons in tornado shelters
Leg irons inside your body
Proof that some white people have actually fondled nooses
That sundown couples
made their vows of love over
opaque peach plastic
and bolt action audiences
Man, the Medgar Evers-second is definitely my favorite law of science
Fondled news clippings and primitive Methodists
My arm changes imperialisms
Simple policing vs. Structural frenzies
Elementary school script vs. Even whiter white spectrums
Artless bleeding and
the challenge of watching civilians think
“terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy…beg for settler polity”
“I am going to go ahead and sharpen these kids’ heads into arrows myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crests.”
Modern fans of war
What with their t-shirt poems
And t-shirt guilt
And me, having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus,
I have no choice but to read the city walls for signs of my life
/
The Chicago Prairie Fire
First, I must apologize to the souls of the house
I am wearing the cheek bones of the mask only
Pill bottle, my name is yours
Name tagged on the side of a factory of wrists
Teeth of the mask now
Back of the head of the mask now
New phase of anti-anthropomorphism fending for real faces
Stuck with one of those cultures that believes I chose this family
I am not creative
Just the silliest of the revolutionaries
My blood drying on
my only jacket
just as God got playful
the police state’s psychic middlemen
Evangelizing for the creation of an un-masses
An un-Medgar
Blood of a lamb less racialized
or awesome prison sentence
Good God
Elder-abuse hired for the low
dog eat genius
Right angle made between a point
On a Louisiana plantation
And 5-year old’s rubber ball
3 feet high and falling
like a deportee plane
to complete my interpretation
(of garden variety genocide)
I am small talk
about loving your enemies
A little more realistically
About paper tigers
And also gold…
I need my left hand back
I broke my neck on the piano keys
Found paradise in a fistfight
Maybe I should check into the Cuba line
Watching the universe’s last metronomes
some call Black Jacobins
Just wait…
These religions will start resigning in a decade or two
Some colorfully
Some transactional-ly
In a cotton gothic society
Class betrayal gone glassless/ I mean ironically/ my window started fogging over too
Wondering which Haiti will get me through this winter
Which poem houses souls
Which socialist breakthroughs
Breakthroughs like ten steps back
Then finally stillness
Stillness
Then stillness among families
a John Brown biography takes a bow
I’m up next to introduce Prosser to Monk
I remember childhood
Remember the word “Childhood” being a beginning
Scribbling on an amazing grace
I rented this body from some circumference of slavery
Remember being kicked out of the Midwest
Strange fruit theater
Lithium and circuses
Likeminded stomachs
The ruling class blessing their blank checks with levy foam…
with opioid tea
Sentient dollar bills yelling to each other pocket to pocket
Cello stands in the precinct for accompanying counterrevolutionaries
My mother raised me with a simple pain
A poet loses his mind, you know, like the room has weather
Or first-girlfriend gravity
Police-knock gravity
Mind-game gravity
Or revolution languishing behind
The sugar in my good friend’s mind
“The difference between me and you
Is that the madness
Wants me forever”
A pair of apartments
Defining both my family
And political composure
Books behind my back
Bail money paved into the streets
Playing:
Euphoria
Euphoria
Cliché
Bracing for the medicine’s recoil
Sharing a dirty deli sandwich with my friends
Black Jacobins
Underground topography
Or grandmother’s hands
Psychology of the mask now
Teeth of the mask again
—
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book of poems, Someone’s Dead Already was nominated for a California Book Award.
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