Mother's Day

when things are good is the last moment
before they are not
a city is a place of falling bullets
Mother's Day: 19 down
do you believe you come from here
rooted to violence
does it grow inside of you like desperation
a hole never full
love is a poor way for patching
it never solids, it weighs heavy, breaks brittle
it's no way to skate surface
rough over
my heart rode down, rides blocks and blocks
how many times I've swallowed another
saying, I came here & fell in love
my city/ where I wondered
what do you see
I choked down knowing I would never leave
wedded to a broken
I never loved more, any morning is a wailing
what I know of loss/ how cement holds bodies
how fear is a way of navigating
a never never land we never grew
-- swerved round where the river turns, but never turns against you
mimic what it means to be a city
when we buried you alive, it was delicate
it was slipcover: we dirted over you
to keep you safe
tell me how a mother dangles
tell me of that dripping, here in New Orleans
we know danger, hardly know anything
is anymore/ we live deep under the nation
we live in this holy, holy lights turned out
eating darkness like a fruiting
how you lean into a city for a lifetime
love like an eruption, love like a scouring
guess who knows how to operate the city
guess what kind of naming I like best
we learn about love from losing
don't you ever forget that
don't you ever try to be more than you are
if you think mother is a type of anchor
watch how we come up against the rocks

RapGenius on the 30 Days of Weezy Project

The great people over at Rap Genius have published all 30 of the poems from the 30 Days of Weezy Project on their site, and I am slowly annotating them along with some help from my poetry collaborators, Geoff Munsterman and Gina Myers. 

They are calling the Weezy poems: "An Epic Poem for our Times" 

*Love*

You can see all the annotations under my album.

This is as close I will probably ever get to being a rap star. 

Poetry Genius also has a nice blog post about the project focusing on the collaborations as well.

It begins:

 For National Poetry Month last April, New Orleans writer Megan Burns set out on a mission to write 30 poems in 30 days, all about Lil Wayne. Mission accomplished! In a truly Rap Genius-esque collaborative effort, Burns partnered with fellow authors Gina Myers and Geoff Munsterman to complete 30 Days of Weezy—and now all 30 poems are on the site with killer Verified annotations!

Burns kicks off Day 1 of the series with an “epistolary response” to a Lil Wayne quote about how some women have “deep and dark” reasons for not being able to love.

Full Blog Post

Weezy and I thank you for all the love, Rap Genius and Poetry Genius!

Day 30: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Photo by Gina Myers

(Collaboration with Megan Burns and Gina Myers, Atlanta)



"chest...caved in, mess on the pavement"
-Lil Wayne

Dear Weezy:

outlined this blue, a world of debt accrued
turning every day into something worthy
& new, blacklisted I bite down on
a slipping beat. Chew on that [for
a bit] ashy-mouth shapes form a gesture
in thrown shades.
My shadow tattooed to the sidewalk
iced or blown, a specific song for any
outlands, a specific object for best
intentions, like a chasing--
blazed down a path, a satellite
of pretensions, an art of mistakes
and the mistaken, rapt gaze caught
on the link joining the last hook to the break.
[Take it all down.] Restart the tape
till shuttering a slammed down solution gutters
down the page. This the new sound,
the future splintered, it's grappling a precise
measure tamped down to its tight lip.

Love,
Megan Burns & Gina Myers

Day 29: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

this one
this one
this one
this one
this one
                                                            Here is a neat problem in poetic logic: if the Dactyl Cyllenius is an alias of Hercules, and Hercules is the thumb, and Titias is the fool's finger, it should be possible to find in the myth of Hercules and Titias the name of the intervening finger, the forefinger, to complete the triad used in the Phrygian blessing.

once you vivisect that best laid
you picture this anatomy a dangling at best
this is not really happening

                                                           Paulus considered. 'I am rather rusty on mythology, my dear Theophilus, but I seem to remember that it is made of the bones of Pelops.' 

so you girl a dragon fire
time yourself so the endings come
each begins & then all storied in the last

                                                           The king is being warned of his ritual death. A Moon-priestess has come to meet him: a terrible robed figure with one arm menacingly akimbo, as she offers an apple, his passport to Paradise. 

when are you 

when are you gonna change

when you change 

                                                         In mediaeval times a garland of periwinkles was placed on the heads of men bound for execution. The flower has five blue petals and is therefore sacred to the Goddess, and its tough green vines will have been the bonds she used on her victim. 

say you are the stories you recall

say you lean in to the where you walked

say you were invisible but then no, you said, no to that

let them bleed

Day 28: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"there goes that monster" 

 -Lil Wayne

Beauty Selections

slumped outstare a moaning, this gristle torn 

put song under black wing, a typical cutting

look mama, a roaring

What I said was I hardly know you anymore

almost seated camera side, glanced

that myth: you ate it up & again

how do you let go of someone

who falls into you

urgent urgent this morning's whirr

case studies of girls who seize 

who pose the pretty laced set

take it this dollar bill

the boy has a name for everything

the knots, the loops

a just imagined below the surface

ruined decay of where we break apart

the way water crushes you as you go deeper

the way your own body turns against you

as you rise : a calling in separate tongues

Day 27: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

desire as the trade 

of what you move around in

beyond an eliciting of words

say you keep the loss of where you thought

a half of what you meant to say

I remember you from the first moment we met

it happens and then it happens again

some bodies beyond the touch of trespass

this recording captures the slip

stumbled forward to press this time a bit short

you always pull away and the scene clips

I didn't know the name of the game we played

stolen back along water where we watched till no sun

once we were and this life is tethered to regret

tried wishing that arc of your life crossed closer

not broken lighted across these doorways

the last time we walked away from the levee

there was no looking back

let it rise as it rises

let the black night stay closer to you

than I will ever muster

"gave up on love

fucking with those heartbeakers" 

 -N. Minaj

Day 26: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"No air stirs, but the music steeps the center --

It is not the sea, but what floats over it." 

- Louis Zukofsky [A-2]

An Other Song

The boys are exiled and generous. The boys have fallen and there is no ignoble gesture too paltry to sweep the errors. The boy is a phantasm of where the parting began fresh as a daisy then dirtied clouds of aphorisms. This boy turns outward in a company constantly or all arts the wind blows. Like and unlike, this one is a manufacturer; he unwalled porticoes in a child's shoring scale of colors. Like everything in America, the boy holds centuries of barbarism in his skin. Then the boy is an executive asset, a simple and smooth machine that cannot doubt nor quite muster indifference. Feed and be fat for no reason at all, this boy keeps a lock down on language, this boy is unaware of the deftness of magpies. "He hath a legion of angels." But don't wonder what martyrs our own offices have futured in a yesterday ceremony: for the next ten thousand years, imagine this book a standard equal to mastery, equine to the flatlands. 

Day 25: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Amends

it was all I could hear any longer

the concept of gesture

the concept of civility

this concept of generalizations: can I 

be a certain kind of celebrated?

came home to a dark but not long 

and never lonely this way of travel

to make an anomaly

you must begin anomalous

can't help wanting to be rescued

I was programmed that way

a distinction in belief if you believe the world

can hold you or it can't

you get all the tries to get it right

until trying is a face of failure

you can't complete

can I be a less than 

culpable story repeated till 

fumbling all day so beauty

shatters the points receding

Day 24: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"I came from there and I promise you do not want to go there." -Lil Wayne



New Orleans


suicidal doors a walkabout in dissarray
some cities come higher or better leveled
this haphazard warrants deathing & decrees its last
surrender, ward to a warding off collected bits
of oracles so the winds blow right or neither
this lessened wishful thinking: rotations
record spins, a storm's caress in repetition
taught the game new syntax for color
models in constraints, for money
you spit tracked back over barricades
through borders, skeins of barnacled
ropes tied sternside for unraveling
boys in their smallest faces
taking their bodies out into the sun
did you ever doubt in your radical
dreaming that all that everything
was just within hand's grasp
and still so much would stay
irretrievably the same

Day 23: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"the writer you are in relation to the deaths you have experienced..." -Lil Wayne


"a moment of terror/ happening every day she/ every day forgets." -Anne Carson



A Project


fielded children in the wayside, a gathering so they squared brick by brick
a city is a drumming, where you congregate, where you push back
& here, a culture slips streeted beats, it is irreverent, then too the martyrdom
of being skinned & of being gendered & of being bodied in a place
that crumbles, in the ruins where we built up from disaster
now the arc is towards white plains swept clean the erasing of doubt
how to monster what we feared what was invisibility is now too clear
occluded: can you build a big enough cage to hold the rage
one by one escaping is a poor tool for making
you break down the master demos for a moneying
forget the places that etched clay red dust into your soles
you carry around the bullet hole that got away
here dying in dozens and dozens & the ones that get
away, sent away, back & back to Angola
a city is where your life span is 18
a city is where old age for certain men
is a never arriving space