Shane Book

Modern

A light mist of beatings

settled all gorgeous

as most sunsets

tend to make us

feel better? — we could not feel

smaller, my executive.

It is custom.

It is feelings.

It is wolfed on fealty

to the meat marketing

board. And the meat.

Elsewhere: a furniture of emotion,

ambient sound

pleasantly hurtling us

toward the old waiting system. 

My executive

continues to work for your executive.

The shed made of human skins

rings and rings

--to be re-cloaked

in our Dengue Fever Never Rains

off-island, if briefly

while everyone slept.

If my executive were reading

the smoke-stained stone architecture

my executive would know

the outbreak hordes

my executive drinks,

the bright day mossy,

the drippy light hurting our eyes,

forever-ed fever seeding fever among us,

and drinks, on a ferry ride.

S.T.A.R.S. (Strategic Tactical Armed Response Squad)

The forest clicked at me.

A lowered fence began

its creaking against the grass.

Mansions of corn, wind-flexed,

licked dudes sprawled

on the ground. Putative lemon de Ville

with the coupe leather seats,                           

cream soldiers, black berets                 

on big fro-ed heads. The force

is not something you

remember. It’s the turtlenecks.

The dominating sugar

factory we lived in,

ready to light a river in two countries –

sorta enormous flotillas of checked                 

best Wycleffs, the brutal best friend,                           

a slap, a shot, slitting the pigs

and the thievery.

Pantherville,

let’s see what settlements

we acquire. How many,           

how many, how many,

how many. She know

she gotta

                        keep me

some cash.                  

Until we’re done                     

with all the thievery,                

safeties off—

Next door homies gambling

on that game Settlers of Wu Tang.

Let’s see what the settler does.

Sarasota Sweats

The brother man

of another man

gravitated downwind

of a stereo

beeping, signatories

ululating at the

ceremonial signing

giving chips and dips,

daps and medal

blips to ex-flips—

all, totally signaling.

That’s how they do.

They’re giving us

a grey theory.

That’s why we can’t

wear the same blue-ish

force protector

singlet every damned

day into mysterioso

neighbourhoods

of abuela-plated

good heat pouring

out of a magma

level smear.

That’d be cray.

And cray don’t

cut it no more.

Juice Juice

All this talk about

who did what

to whom stays fresh

in these rooms with their

special skies, meeting

yourself again and again

coming faster

than water. No one talks

about Africa though

everyone has been—

its gift to us flying

of its own accord, not

frighteningly, just eating bugs.

To think is the hard thing:

we had a lake once

and now it’s an ocean;

different altitudes,

sprays, ways of doing

things. It asks the questions

these days, with so many

interchangeable parts:

a fortress can be built

to a bay, a bay dug

up as a fleet of canoes,

planes, even a rubber

tree can curve

like a summer.

All the Feels

Already knew what they wanted.

The earth liberation orchestra

never lies. Just look at the facts:

Carne Asada Shakur steady dropping

tracks from her cloud caster,

motorized Ottoman fashioned

of organic omega-threes,

thick caged West African prints wax-stamped

à la Shenzhen -- and y’all wondering where

somebody hid? That the script notes only

point up the prude salad bar trifecta

cat cohorts short-selling on the strip,

none could be all that surprised.

Don’t matter. Few notions stay

un-gentrified. Late night diner Mofongo

Afro Puff cereal con deep coat of mood

even laid down steep into blonder wood bowls

just won’t quit

the Hot Beignets scent

from poured out Benjamins

like two small river berries touching

hairs into a beige-ness beyond

all convex metallic cones

grits exhalations of boots.

Tippin’ The Rafla On Three Wheels

Nah, before all that.

Sunrise. Just us dropping

on shocks, a pounce-spirit

muscling its way along

the street, mashed sounds

smashed to a shell-burnt

sulfur and all the oil neck

charms anyone could use.

Crucifix rope gold Virgin

de Guadeloupe under

deepest midnight blue sky

beach towel lit by stars,

she pilots a crocodile across

the quarters, hood quieting

the dawn’s sizzurp gleam.

Out beyond, amongst

the snarelight, nothing

but the guap promise,

a confessed relentlessness

depicted in the book of blizzards.

Das Kapital

While I try to fast-break blockchains

like Rest In Peace Harriet Tubman,

homies be broke from popping

bottle service bubbly. My way around it: 

I ghost ride the Phantom with the loudspeaker

auto-tuning horror movie shout-laughs.

I’m so good, God,

satchels stuffed with green

made I live like an ambassador. God,

you good? Leaving pics on the gram

then acting like you ain’t know me is a lot

like The Dream of the Unified Sativa Field Theory

--any artist that can make a person

listen without fury

is next level. You sure you good? God,

I would come to where you at

but I’m dabbing wax with a shovel

going up the ladder.

They mad, make them madder.

They can’t keep the pills

away from the profit.

Across my inner soul brother sprawls

a long money stain—no more slaving!

I ride with heat so, so, so

soo-woop in y’all’s mofo clouds.

Gang-gang I make it rain.

The Nervous Hunger of an Ox

Something has eaten into it while we slept

in our compass, amidst the forest of arms,

and arrayed our phantom refusals,

the sensation of someone watching

you in front of the police station.

The words we chose didn’t acquiesce;

the game was called because of darkness.

In this way it feels almost impossible

not to begin cataloguing, during

the blissy weeks of beginning with a guard

car outside, the sort of pressure that

weather responds to

numerically, as with our phobias.

And who knows if more high-minded inshallahs

awaited us besides those shear haircuts

in Smolesnk. All we know for sure

is the coming past continues to awaken us

with its undiscovered negations like birdsong

from one of those trains. I hated it too but did

not fight again. I went the other way,

found my place and work

among those who are afraid.

“Not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare occurrence.”

My minor trickle loosing its way through town,

all roofs red, redder in the stalled December summer,

beckoning as if people, wind battered bricks were an afterthought,

corrects itself while losing itself on a map-less amble, 

yet ever cool are the seawalls and long their sweep

under a hopeful sign just over there, billboard for beer

leering its restless leer among rolling acres of yellow flowers

pointing to the near impossibility of continuity, as mud minarets

bristling with sticks reduce the surrounding huts to general landscape

bedecking any season. Soon a man started shouting

from his boat. His hair matted with thought and the red perfume

of forces on horseback, rifles sheathed in saddles

as one flame-wreathed town burns into another.

Soon a faraway man on a fortress wall, holding

a stick with cloth bag tied to its end poking the large tree

for fruit, while the datum curls ever closer, higher

unfurling away. One story has the man running

through deserts to another man

and so on until the last runs five days unceasing, dying

with news in his throat. Well, sure, a messenger’s task is uneasy

but not for the obvious reasons, a wandering shoreline

continually imagined as its previous iteration though the orchard

of miniature berry trees blooms on schedule.

The trees seem to fade more each year. The redness

left on the ground believes itself a perfected plan, and why not,

“To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies.”

The Rio Communiqué

Gusts thwacked tarps.  Meat smells ricocheted

plank to post. We gave up as we can, to another goal;

green fruit. No way to know at that moment

a marauding group with a megaphone

filed toward the Candomblé sector, throwing political shadows

like the Mont Ste. Marie snow-making machine noise

twisting narrowly past boulders, ice shelves—

steep banked too savage for anything but

caterpillar treads—the sound’s angle tipped up on its sharpest edge

each pine needle felt as winter’s advent

but also, the clarity that months and months of silence

had ended battering every feather, signaling the strangest

permanence. No snow in this part of the hemisphere,

we remember how to use the bowl of teeth, the tealeaf headdress.

The specter shuffles closer, farther, waiting, wending like a wasp,

a field of wasps, unfinished, pointing the way.