Heaven Is All Goodbyes - Tongo Eisen-Martin

A 1978 statement 
 
My brother and I are driving
In an empty cell lane 
 
We are God's evil to these settlers
They might throw us under the shift change
 
We take wolf naps
 
We don't know what else we good at besides this traveling
 
State lines in a night tide passing through beachhead america
Passing with hurricane memory 
-Three thousand exits of sludge-bathed apartheid 
 
Everything south of canada is extrajudicial gun oil
And your local unemployment factory
 
In a few hours we will fit in                            Relax for now 
 
Hop out of the car and I'm a dirty shoe illusion 
Leaning on the trunk with the ghosts of switchblades
                                                                                    And other rusty services 
 
I am enemy humor 
And traveling
 
Father’s ashes on the back seat behind two sons
 

In a lane not for metaphor 

Well, maybe a metaphor about something unfinished 

-One million hands passing us through the Midwest

 
Last wishes by way of fishtail/Day dreams by way of collision/Home in the badlands of translation/Relaxed passing/Great grandparents' finger bones/Father's ashes /No longer arms/Just tattoos
 
Badlands imagination 
Barreling
Translating 
A father's last trip home
 
We don't know what else we good at besides this traveling
 
Exits in collage/Exits in pieces/Pieces of 1970s kitchen plates/
In a good luck refrigerator/We still ain't ate/The narcotic swing of how we see yesterday
 
Get out of the car against desperate white supremacy
 
Gas station greetings
Stray dogs
And other earth born alarms
            We are stray deadly
 
Against desperate white supremacy/And other senses/That die silly/And have murdered
 
We don't know what else we good at
Besides this traveling 
 
Two coins/ or the toll is us
 
Character interstate on a journey of a million parallels
 
Some like us better high/Some like us better drunk/Every late night has a summer to it/Cousin breeze and murder rate 
 
Barreling like gut born love songs
Your ancestors are smiling
 
As we pass the time
When we ride
It's language
 
Passed Gary 3000
Cast iron lining /Proud forearms for meals
 
Three man ghost story
 
Fishers of ourselves 
 
Cards dealt
 
Narrative implied  
 
Maybe something unfinished 
 
Like an Indiana hurricane
Or two midnights in Milwaukee 
 
Or no arms
No tattoos
No Chicago
Ever again
 
We don't know what else we good at
Besides this traveling 
 
And besides
Heaven is all goodbyes 
Anyway

Tongo is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.

Selected Works, Tongo Eisen-Martin

I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money

 

I go to the railroad tracks

And follow them to the station of my enemies

 

A cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mugshot negative

 

All over the united states, there are

Toddlers in the rock

 

I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket

And why blood agreements mean a lot

And why I get shot back at

 

I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway

 

White skin tattooed on my right forearm

Ricochet sewage near where I collapsed

into a rat-infested manhood

 

My new existence as living graffiti

 

The new bullets pray over blankets made from old bullets

 

The 28^th hour’s next beauty mark

The waist band before the next protest poster

 

Bought slavers some time, didn’t it?

The tantric screeches of military bolts and Election-Tuesday cars

 

Proof that some white people have fondled nooses

That sundown couples

made their vows of love over  

opaque peach plastic

and bolt action audiences      

 

Man, the Medgar Evers-second is definitely my favorite law of science

 

Fondled news clippings and primitive Methodists

My arm changes imperialisms

Simple policing vs. Structural frenzies

Elementary school script vs. Even whiter white spectrums

 

Artless bleeding and

the challenge of watching civilians think

           

“terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy…beg for settler polity”

 

“I am going to go ahead and sharpen these kids’ heads into arrows myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crests.”

 

Modern fans of war

            What with their t-shirt poems

            And t-shirt guilt

 

And me, having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus,

I have no choice but to read the city walls for signs of my life

No Stars Over the Trenches Tonight

 

Malcom X’s ballroom jacket slung over my son’s shoulders

Pharmacy doors mid-slide

                        The figment of village

                                                            a noon noose to a new white preacher

Wiretaps in the discount kitchen tile

-All in an abstract painting of a president

 

Half man on scratch paper

Half pickpocket with flailing arms

 

double fisted

I am an alcoholic in search of history books

                                                                                    ruining the local train in search of

history books

I am limping to poetry

 

a Reagan meeting adjourns and modern plant life begins

along with dry out-of-body insight, tools and nails in a bucket,

a poor person’s bird atrium

along with unprovable music theory

-The poem turns into absolute political failure

 

 

Carceral state mythology of a factory’s first Black chaplin

Introducing:

the bible that goes bump

or a flower of harm

or the knife fight the day after the last day of history

county line cop lights gone cold like

bourgeois state lunch on an international bridge

-the Mississippi mixtape

 

 

A fly studies me at a border crossing
It has been studying everything at this border

Including the police graduation gowns

 

Open air silence in the pan

Then silence closing in on an imperialist opera

I mean I was there the night that

San Francisco disappeared

 

Like listening to Nina Simone later in life…

Won’t you fly a little, Lord

Won’t you put a space heater in my grave

It’s the people who facilitate themselves, Lord

 

My only change of clothes prosecuted

The government has finally learned how to write poems

I Imitate You

 

“Believe in the street, brother”

 

60s newspaper clippings and teeth hang on a string

 “Like a book of life, man”

 

The unfortunate alliance

between killer and killed

replaces the hippies with white people

 

 

I talked to class-less people today

They were not overworked nor military captains

They were not wage-washed nor born in a series

 

Maybe I am the last white man on earth

 

A church signals another church with mirrors and nose-drips

 

The spirit-world up and starts murdering city trees

 

My poem

My cubist-remade scar

My Saturn for adults

My junkie industrialism

Made interestingly heart-felt

 

“I knew my father as much as I want to be known”

 

I Make Promises Before I Dream

 

No unclaimed, cremated mothers this year

 

Nor collateral white skin

 

No mothers folding clothes to a corporate park preamble

No sons singing under the bright lights of a lumber yard

 

Quantum reaganomics and the tap steps of turning on a friend

 

New York trophy parts among

the limbs of decent people

Being an enraged artist is like

entering a room and not knowing what to get high off of

 

My formative symbols/My upbringing flying to an agent’s ears

I might as well be an activist

 

Called my girlfriend and described

All the bottles segregationists had thrown at me that day

 

Described recent blues sites and soothing prosecutions

I feared for my poetry

 

You have to make art every once in a while

            While in the company of sell-outs

            Accountant books in deified bulk

            Or while waiting for a girl under a modern chandelier

                                               

Or in your last lobby as a wanderer

 

The prison foot races the museum

 

My instrument ends

 

I mean, what is a calendar to the slave?

Also, what is a crystal prism?

 

“He bought this bullet,

bought its flight,

then bought two more”

Cut A Hand From A Hand by Tongo Eisen-Martin

“if you reverse the car any farther,

you will run over all the scenes in the back of your mind”

I never cared for teachers…just the pattern of fainting spells induced by wall art.

Propaganda is courage, man

The price sticker hid my tattoo

-I treasure my problem with the world

“My mother becomes from Brooklyn first thing in the morning”

-a proverb around these parts

               proverb or peasant entrance password

Writing short notes to famous Europeans

On the backs of post cards

With ransom requests

They reply with a newsreel or cigarette announcement (I can’t tell the difference)

-Noble dollars then you die inside

(but only inside)

“They call it, ‘sleeping deeper than your stalker.’

And stalker is all that badge makes you,”

says a great spirit dressed in the bloody rags tuxedos became

meanwhile my punch is feared by no one

“Proud of yourself?” I ask the fret hand

“Porch Lights” is what they call our guns

I’ve seen this house in a dream

I’ve seen this chair on behalf of a dream

               I believe a trumpet was the first possessed object to fly

“keep going,” she cheers

               the draft in the room becomes a toddler

obsessed with the altar

the altar becomes  a runaway train

               got a thousand paintings cascading down my skinny arms

                                                            Dictionaries piling up to the window bars

basements called dope fiend cocoons

crowd into the part of my mind

referred to as my heart

-a reminder to the population that

your blanket can work with

or against you-

human reef/

we will be a big human reef

for concepts that finally gain a metaphysical nature

and they will swim around our beautiful poses

we stop being flashbacks

then stop being three different people

then I was alone [the pistol is one city away]

one of the drug triangle’s lines runs through my head

tap the bottle twice and consider the dead refreshed

“don’t you want to rest your bravery?

don’t you want to be a coward for a little bit?”

-back and forth to a panic attack with no problems nor fears

a man gets a facial expression finally

a Friday finally goes his way

his life is finally talked about happily in his head

I can’t possess the body of a hermit

I must be the last of his smoke

Now running away with three blocks of alley

Tucked under my arm

You ever see a man

get to the bottom of his soul

in a car ride down a missing cousin’s street?

half step to the right

I mean I took the whole car outside of history

Half step to the right

I mean a whole pack of wolves stepped to my left

-Deep in the recesses of the main recess

“road marker” is what I called the light bulb we had for a sun

                                                            a whole civilization might slink to the sink

                                                                                          chain gang shuffling next to a sucker

-the long look in the mirror [a stack of money starts talking from four cities away]

Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, published in the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.