Poetry: Homage to Fred Hampton by Michael Begnal

“Racism is a byproduct of capitalism.”—F. H.

What should be the homage?
Not (just) the heroicization

of the admired figure fighting

        (the police or
(reactionary forces

        of capitalism)
but feeling in one’s self

the stark and ugly shock
of responsibility,

the recognition of one’s
own shoddy place in a system

I want to answer Hampton’s
call and respond—

“I am a revolutionary”—
yet the film in which I view

his speeches is delivered
via a large media conglomerate

on the platform of
another corporation
whose project is

to mold our means of perception
for the profit of ______

there, the iconography of the gun,
its barrel and strap,

it being held aloft
by a group of militants

in saturated black and white:
while useful in its moment,

may not be sufficient
to unravel the skein

of strands of participation
in the concentration of [        ] wealth

•

“The reason I do a lot of talking is because
there’s no foregone conclusions with me.” —F. H.

How should the poem
be constructed?

How to revolutionize
one’s (my) own (mechanical) mind

raw in the very air
in which it was formed

so that it is not just more
consuming in the consuming

industry of culture,
is there some metaphor?

private prisons not a metaphor,
Jamestown not a metaphor,

nor Dolphy’s Out to Lunch
bespattered atop a pile of records

in the shot-up apartment
as the camera pans the aftermath

it may be that
an antiracist poem

is not possible to write here
and that I will continue

the process of revision
long after it has been submitted—

Michael Begnal is author of the collections Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), the chapbooks Tropospheric Clouds (Adjunct Press, 2020) and The Muddy Banks (Ghost City Press, 2016), and the critical monograph The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022). http://www.mikebegnal.blogspot.com