The Old Negro Spiritual

The Old Negro Spiritual
in four parts

I

The struggle our struggle
Seen nothing but trouble
of peoples in trenches
Bottoms of totem poles

A light so dim
Times never right
Not a hug nor a kiss
Never killed for a man

But "Billy Lyons" crossing-up
The game of Stagger
Questions surrounding archetype
"Objects to be observed"

Nothing at all for
The sensitive intellectual
never from bourgeois families
Taken like Jews from the ghettos

II

Rudest boy honed through rehearsal
Nowhere no nothing not
But highest-concept
Living not real

Because the entire purpose
Making it worthwhile
Output production ratio
Many times over consumption

A fetish for shoes
Put on and taken off for
And the embarrassment
of praise and disease ignored

Conceptual epiphany
Sequentially at best
Arrhythmia and the
Awkwardly disappointing

III

Do not hate it when
You become
What you thought you hated
The history of the American people

Like sheep in wolf's clothing
A metaphor flipped
Like "good girls'" conversion
to dirty fuck sluts

Frightening and paranoid
For sins committed
Bridges burning and
Crimes left unpunished

Dark and provocative
Previsions of confusion
Given blessings by the
Sick, the Sicker, and the Sickest

IV

A rumbling felt
Guilt surgically replacing
Shadows of dark clouds
Always weapons more and more lethal

The Id, the Ego, and the Super-ego
The cycles of cycles
Sucked like gravity
Backlogs like rain forests

When I ponder
The songs of my funeral
And if all accounts balance
regret-to-satisfaction

The struggle my struggle
Lived nothing but trouble
Falling in ditches
To die like the rest