Confession To Malcolm
Conyus

i killed you Malcolm,
the first time i got locked
inside my shit yellow complexion
& laughed at all my black brothers
who walked through life with glassy dos
& morphine eyes.

i killed you that time
i let sonny boy get his
ass kicked by some white boys
in the junior high school toilet,
while i ran outside to even the odds.

i killed you when shirley
my half sister by my mothers
other husband called me a
bastard black shit-yellow ass
nigger child in front of my other
half sister & brother,
& i cried instead of reciting poetry.

i killed you when augie
went to hustling up on 12th
street for bobo & mother
thought she was at the library.

i murdered you at fords
when i went to work for this
old honkie foreman who told me
that my father was a good boy
who had worked hard until the
day he died at his job for
thirty years & hoped i could
do as well.

i lynched you in hudson's dept. store
that xmas when the white clerk talked
to my mother like she was a piece of
black trash because she touched some
costume jewelry to her tired breast
& tarnished the copper, ivory.

i killed you when i reached
for a jar of conk o lean
bleaching out dreams in my veins
with another spoon of shit,
angry because i couldn't join
the elite crowd with a pair of
triple-a cancellation knob toes
& have a coming out party.

i murdered you when they
tied emmet till to the bottom
of the mississippi & shot medgar in the night;
martin is dead, birds throat cut, trane,
billie, eric gone in the night. another
moat filled with the bodies of black genius.

and then there was pee wee
who died in his mothers stomach,
black and lonely like so many nigger children
whose mothers have to sit in lines at
the county hospital while the hemmorage
fills up her stomach with the lethal liquid.

i killed you the first time
i let them rape me in the cane field
or laid atop some lumpy mattress
with my thighs spread for $10.00
& a bag of funky chitterlings.

i killed you in college
with a quo-vadis strung tight
around my head like a brain tumor,
performing tricks on the football field
like a lion unleashed in the roman pits.

i murdered you Malcolm
when i let jimmy baldwin
get fucked in the ass by giovanni
to substantiate white religion,

i killed you when
i sanctioned rochester to act
like a fool nigger or lightin to do
imitations of butterfly mcqueen on his knees.

i killed you in bohemian quarters
throughout the world, selling black
for a quick fuck or some folksy job
in a dirty coffee house.

i killed you when i continued to live
in this denatured racist democracy laugh
the first time i laid foot on this soil
not of my own free will & forgot swahili,
yoruba, bantu, pig latin, the dozens...

i killed you Malcolm
from that first day
i killed you.