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[unearthingbone.livejournal.com]

From his Hoops, which is a smashbang of a collection.

SELLING OUT
Major Jackson

for Mat Johnson

Off from a double at McDonald's,
no autumnal pinata, no dying
leaves crumpling to bits of colored
paper on the sidewalks only yesterday,
just each breath bursting to explosive fog
in a dead-end alley near Fifth, where on
my knees, with my fingers laced on my head
and a square barrel prodding a temple,
I thought of me in the afterlife.
Moments ago, Chris Wilder and I
jogged down Girard, lost in the promise
of two girls who winked past pitched
lanes of burgers and square chips
of fish, at us, reigning over grills and vats.
Moments ago, a barrage of beepers
and timers smeared the lengths of our chests.
A swarm of hard-hatted dayworkers
coated in white dust, mothers on relief,
the minimum-waged poor from the fast-
food joints lining Broad, inched us closed
in a check-cashing line towards the window
of our dreams,--all of us anxious to enact
the power of our riches: me in the afterlife.
What did it matter, Chris and I still
in our polyester uniforms caked
with day-old batter, setting out
for an evening of passion marks?
We wore Gazelles, matching sheepskins,
and the ushanka, miles from Leningrad.
Chris said, Let's cop some blow despite
my schoolboy jitters. A loose spread
of dealers preserved corners. Then a kid,
large for the chrome Huffy he pedaled,
said he had the white stuff and led us
to an alley fronted by an iron gate on
a gentrified street edging Northern Liberties.
I turned to tell Chris how the night
air dissolved like soil, how jangling
keys made my neck itch, how maybe
this wasn't so good an idea, when
the cold opening of gun-barrel
steel poled my head, and Chris's eyes
widened like two water spills before
he bound away to a future of headphones
and release parties. Me? The afterlife?
Had I ever welcomed back the old
neighborhood? Might a longing
persistent as the seedcorn maggot
tunnel through me? All I know:
a single dog barked his own vapor,
an emptiness echoed through blasted
shells of rowhomes rising above,
and I heard deliverance in the bare
branches fingering a series of powerlines
in silhouette to the moon's hushed
excursion across the battered fields
of our lives, that endless night
of ricocheting fear and shame.
No one survives, no one unclasps
his few strands of gold chains
or hums "Amazing Grace" or pours
all his measly bills and coins into the trembling,
free hand of his brother and survives.
No one is forced facedown and waits
forty minutes to rise and begin again
his march, past the ice-crusted dirt,
without friendship or love, who barely knew
why the cry of the earth set him running,
even from the season's string of lights,
flashing its pathetic shot at cheer--to arrive
here, where the page is blank, an afterlife.