Digital Poetics 3.9 3 Poems by Ronnie McGrath
FLATLINE
We fall with the wounded rain / onto the dead embers of an immolated planet / skin of me blasted by the politics of media manufacturing folk devils / the puppeteers fingers in many pies / always in many pies/ pulling on string theory/ pulling on lynch ropes / hypnotising drones with a scent of the magnolia trees obsession / its eyes of bullet holes swinging like the maleficent music of some macabre quartet in black face and minstrel mode / history repeats itself / again and again / like a hail of nefarious bullets / heat-seeking melanin / penetrating mela-skin with barcodes and nana satellites entering shakti / entering dark matter/ entering light/ Dendera’s zodiac in chaos/ the melon man watered down / the melon man forced underground / the melon man shot / the melon man killed / Malcolm /Martin/ Medgar / murdered/ choke hold / choke held in the indefinite detention of servitude / their solar boat minds consumed by a conspicuous consumption / their solar boat lips misrepresented by the crude obesity of augmentation/ intestines of some hyaluronic shim/ a grotesque restyling of Nubian features morphed into dollars signs and thaumaturgical car symbolism / their pharaoh’s nose imaged wrong / the black of their blue slanted / burnt sugar skin bleached out of the fold / filtered out of the celluloid night / where screens imitate the flickering shadows of primordial cave paintings/ reality in drag again/the weaved contour follicled/ the false fingering of a dissonant notation blemished/ the holographic universe concealed like our secret knowledge purloined / drapes of the censored eye pulled over the gaze like iron curtains / another man down/ down/ down/another man getting down/ down/ down/ with Gil/with James/ with Mayfield/ with Marvin/ get down Black man /onto your knees/ your hands of oppression raised into the air/ where the stars hover as witness to your slaughter/ subaltern speaker of truth you/ civiliser of the people’s rights you/ Ra’s astrological earth child/ revolutionary mouth of some architectonic geometry/ get down black man/ beneath sunlight and Baobab tree/ beneath ship bowel/ beneath the sea level’s reckless eyeballing / beneath Zong/ the dark moon falling with the wounded rain / entombed coffins of the sands sarcophagated floor /where a man overboard is thrown/ among the servitude of women/ the seventh extinction of him / into the iron lungs of dead sea water / O the carnage of Atlantis/ the fall of Kemet/ black Ark drowning in a southern tree/ I can’t breathe/ I can’t breathe / flat line/
Meghan’s Sparkle
A faint outline known as history
Architecture of the master builder’s contribution hidden
By the distorted mirror’s take on things
The subtle moon bears witness to the pyramid’s unfolding
Incredible leaves of an expanding edifice that it is
The Nubian sky knows the wisdom of stars when awoken
Their Jimmy Baldwin eyes looking for the mystery of me
Behind fingerprints
Behind surrealism
Behind the secret alphabet of miraculous cloud formations
Where altars and spirits congregate to tell their stories
In Patois and First Nation scripts
Slice by slice I am imaged wrong in the calculated effect of a hit movie
Bleached out of the nude sunlight by the cartographer’s realignment
My pharaoh’s nose without landmass or shore to cling to
Only the earth knows why this delicate existence is a precarious
Passage of middle and margin politics
Of centre and decentring
The frangible mass of it all is a brittle clock intestine coming to a close
We fade to black
Safe in the roots of our melaskin
E-raced.
LANGSTON’S HUE
I HAVE KNOWN FATHERS/black/brown/ and beige clusters of men whose souls are as deep as rivers/men upon men who morph into a pale normality/where the politics of hair is the bane of negro features/and style becomes the involuntary death of their combs/dudes/spars/bredrins/fam/the main man of other men/whose fathers are an ancient patriarchy/whose fathers discipline their children with the legacy of the Maafa/spiking out of their belts in a post-traumatic slave syndrome/I HAVE KNOWN FATHERS/black/brown/and beige clusters of men whose presence is defined by a persistent absence in the home/spaced out on promiscuity/they drink to forget their crack habit is neither a friend or foe/just a tragic form of the grotesque trickster/in a long line of confidence men pretending to be pocomanic witch doctors with PhDs/I HAVE KNOWN FATHERS/whose deep/dark/blue/black love and generosity have sprinkled stars in the sky where the darkness was alone/and could no longer pretend to be a whisper/and the moon and the sun/and the birth of a poem became an imminent light/bringing forth a concinnous knowledge of an emancipated self/ I HAVE KNOWN FATHERS/black/brown/and beige clusters of men whose egos upon egos of themselves are a totemic system of media and cars/their engines running on the death of their children’s education/the ignorant sound of their bling/worthless metal against the deafness of stone/coffins regurgitating oil wells/sparkling out of the holographic universe/like the second coming of a blasphemy/like the fake smile of a dull moon pretending to be a jewel in the skies membrane/I HAVE KNOWN FATHERS/erudite/and bookish clusters of men/whose lineage to the pharaoh is a tacit dress code/the walls of their clandestine skins bearing the scars of hieroglyphic scripture formation/black notations imbued with talk of melanin melaskin dripping from the solar boats of their Dogonic nose/like a vertiginous planet depleted/men of Oshun rivers/men of consciousness/Soledad brothers/Mumia/Biko/Ture/Malcolm/Patrice/their souls deep as the ebony trees from which their children are carved/
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RONNIE MCGRATH (aka “ronsurreal”) is a socially conscious visual artist, neo-surrealist poet, and novelist. He teaches creative writing in a diverse range of educational settings in London, Gloucestershire, Bristol, and Bath. A former creative writing lecturer at The University of The Arts, he is also a founding member of the now-defunct musical group The London Afro Blok. In 1993, he was commended for his writing by ACER, which later published and awarded him first place for his writing. He is the author of the poetry collection Data Trace (2010), the novel On the Verge of Losing It (2005), and the chapbook Poems from The Tired Lips of Newspapers (2003). His work has appeared in IC3 The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, and he has published paintings in Callaloo: Journal of African American Arts and Letters – The Politics Issue (Vol. 31, No. 4). In 2008 he appeared in the BBC 4 documentary Tales from the Front Room, an installation based on the work by Michael McMillan, artist, and playwright. As well as having his painting featured on the front cover of Vector, African and Afrodiasporic Science Fiction #289, Ronnie has recently published work in Black Lives Have Always Mattered, a collection of essays, poems, and personal narratives, the poetry anthology Filigree, and Glimpse, an anthology of black speculative writing in Britain. His latest work is an epigrammatic experimental text titled Watermelon: rivers of love speeches, a conceptual prose work of things unspoken.
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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
