“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
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