This that shit to make you call the dispatcher
Spliffs that stiff it’ll turn your lips black
Leave burns on your mismatched kicks

Top notch and hotter than
scotch bonnets
Promise we hopscotch over the comp
from Shaolin to Botswana

The equivalent of priests
seeking deliverance
from bleak winters
Climbing steep pinnacles
Rhyme unique syllables

Piles of snow
Chillin in the ‘lo rugby
Wild flow turn
Pretty women ugly

Circle O’s of smoke
smirking in the fur coat
cracking jokes pack a load
but no tobacco

Men act childish
Crack vials on the playground
Stack dollars, count digits
wack niggas
Should snap out of it

Razor sharp nails
Blade cigars
Safely flame the bonsai in my haven
Tailored Clarks on
Sippin’ Bailey’s
dark-skin lady on the arm

Round the back
Crafty swoops
Face-the-basket passes.

Ball in.
Bawlin’ court pleas.
Shoulders locked in
short sleeves.

Manny picked his number
when he missed the jumper.
Need to go up,
to go under.

These niggas hopped out the gym
Once.
We swore they just got out the pen.
Thunderous soaring.

Now it’s a game.
We play foul, but
the punk wouldn’t call it.

Grunting, stave him off.
Slay him. Cross.
You know he’ll jack,
if you tax him in the paint.

I’m feelin’ it.
Just as coach arrives.
we’ll be coaxed to try.

“I turned my ankle
by them bros
burning on the bench.”

Sit this one. He’s got
too many tricks.

Manhattan is the center of the world, some say. For me, and the other people raised in the outer boroughs, Manhattan is the money vessel. People buy and sell objects at incredible rates, and if you’re lucky, you can be in on the trade. Sure there are thriving industries in the other parts of the city, and upstate, and in New Jersey, but Manhattan’s got those billions of fresh paper duckets, and none too many touch human fingerprints.

The train provides a magnetized driver for our affairs, shuttling people into the money pit, spitting them back home after a while. To call it an iron horse is a misnomer. If anything, the train is a slippery worm or an underground snake compressed into the area of its tunnel. The rides I take now differ significantly from those early journeys to prep school. I learned from the morning ritual of stamping up from my basement room, entering the bathroom with a puffy and regretful scowl, zipping up my shiny down coat, and looking out to see if the bus was coming at 6:15, that diligence without purpose is just habit. My habit was going to school, and I despised it. I had no idea when I formed the habit, but I knew it wasn’t my imagining. Even on the best days, with the most enlightening lessons inherited from those stodgy halls, I could only discern some alien routine being impressed on me: the inevitable click of fastening to work. It started on the train, where the commute lightened complexions as I went toward Manhattan and darkened as I went away from it.

Manhattan keep on makin’ it.

Brooklyn keep on takin’ it.

On the 17 bus ride, Canarsie turned into East New York through split homes and half suburbs. That was the kind of improvised community contained in those neighborhoods, mostly immigrants stuffing into sizable but affordable digs. Two-story houses were sliced in half to fit twice the people, dividing comforts and budgets for at least a glance at the Dream. Hearing the neighbors’ indiscreet fights, I padded reality with surrounding music like Biggie Smalls or Jay-Z. I slipped out the door expecting to run for the bus, transfer to the snake at Yard Avenue and pop up on Swanky Street. Not a bad price for my education, I thought, because a few hours of commuting outside of my bodily space, my mental sanctity, could prepare me for the world’s shiniest bullshit. But it had the opposite effect. Often I narrowed in on the nobility of the countless black women I saw in nurse’s scrubs dragging their feet on the way home to a mortgage from a care facility. Or I’d see workers with paint matted jeans drooping their eyes and holding their belt straps. And we’d all be headed in the same direction to the illusive city. What was so marvelous about this city that it brought everyone’s reserved labor to the surface? That even with fatigue rising from beneath our collars, sleep hanging on our brows, we flocked to it? Besides the ability to buy things at all hours, and catch a bus on every corner, I held the city’s supposed convenience up for questioning.

The economy of colonial powers has always relied on the willingness of workers to come to the center of trade. Whether the draw of commerce is real or not, the money flashes like so many faulty traffic lights. It is the perfect diversion from a rotting, grease-filled grid of streets. City dwellers find examples of vitality in the rodents creeping between subway tracks, and in their oily fur we hear our beating pace. The blood of ten million mammals is the city’s secret treasure, not the money. With that blood coursing rapidly, and our minds mesmerized by the indistinct murmur of choppy train wheels clacking over bridges, we are tossed in a bubbling cauldron of fecal gumbo. Money is the root of earthly possessiveness. When blood and money mix, I feel the alchemy of human betrayals descending on my spirit. But I cannot reject money as much as I strive to reject its pull to one way of life. The value of any place may be in its nearness to an original source. The New York Dutch colony sprung up out of the spirit of trade that already lived there before settlers arrived. As an outlet to the Atlantic Ocean, and the midway point between the Great North and the stretching coastline, Manhattan is geographically fixed where people will always plant. But if the people are only a part of some artificial groove to get that paper, the location will change permanently. New York City is my city, but no longer my home. Home is where the heart is, and New York hasn’t preserved the heart of its first incarnation. In its place is a struggling machine that emulates the human qualities we all need for survival.

I’ll take the A train to listen to the ghosts of all the workers who came through those tunnels.

In love, I’m just meddling

Shrug as I leave behind

Begrudging blood and estrogen

Shrubs of excellent rebuttal

I dug for the pectin, sucked on your nectar

Skin connects limbs to sediment

And if you ground me, we can

material

together — fears into imperial

pleasure, combine myriad elements

above

But all I’ve sent is

teary-eyed memories in letters

Of cooked vegetables, lush adventures

turned experiments

Amorous should be

glamor without gluttony

but our lens is colored with amber

Honey would dump me for the duppy

Risk not the covetous or

Indulge comfortably

Empathy, nudge me to her fruit

I beg of you

Rush me through a buzz of

intoxicants; I’ll find

oxygen and come

Over time, over brook,

over hill, overlook

the rest of me that tugs emptily

at buds

of a swiveling chair

my crown imitated 

its base

Jean, like all my Haitian coiffeurs,

spit rapid patois.

Raising his gauge.

Razing with blade.

Sizzling embers of nap,

Black clouds of chaff

Drift down

to surround my kicks like ash. 

My eyes followed his flapping

for discernible lessons,

but found loving profanity

and chesty laughter. 

“Uh oh! Uh oh!” 

on repeat for funny banter

And standing men,

Firing lines of pompous credo:

‘Pippen ain’t SHIT without Jordan

so stop trippin! On that

buuuullshit.’

Squirming on the phonebook

beneath my undeveloped botty,

I observed class rules. The first?

Out of turn comments meet reproach!

Glass window biology tested 

Front row chairs on 

Fastest head-turn

Booties: Roundness vs. Flatness

And leg-to-breast ratio

Monday can’t be school,

I thought.

Abandoned junk

The place stunk of famine

You carryin’ that candid look 

And sunk into the canyon of

Drunks and drug addicts

You bunk with the valley’s doves

‘Cuz ghetto gates scrape angrily 

At grapes dangling

Fantasy creates anguish 

For fate’s entanglements

Mangled mutts bare fangs

Choking ivy stares blank

But ropes sublimely

Who dares bank

Where hope is stymied?

There’s no curbin’ 

Urban rot

You’re deferred

When you stop to get a word in

Emergent sprouts curl

With malfeasance

Like they’ve no concern about seasons

Final 

I could say:

Ain’t no shame in my game.

But it’d be a lie

You engulf. 

I’m an amorous parasite for you because

you create universes, and wars, and famine

and babies, and theories, and inventions.

Insult to injury, I know. 

But in the smell of your underwear, I found 

unexplained bliss and natural reserve.

I never understood you, or your gurgling language.

Your decisions ground me into the pulp that I was,

and spilled the nectar that I was not. 

I don’t plan to get over you. 

The great ones are beyond the plan or 

the groundwork. 

Yet, you must envelop yourself in love’s plan so its

promised pillars protect you,

or crumble down on you.

Depending on who it is. 

I want you to have my child, it seems,

my next object-person-concern.

I poisoned the soil but,

that’s where I come from: tainted dirt, deceptive sperm, willing womb.

Grant me this: 

Lying love. Draining attachment. Pure laughter. Slow, uneasy repair.

And I will take that over:

You gone.

Mr. Smith came to Manhattan on the 2 train, while I took the D from the other side of Brooklyn. Sometimes, on the IRT platform at 72nd Street, I would see Mr. Smith in the early hours. He was my eighth grade English instructor, so he had to attend the morning meeting. But beyond that, he knew my school’s rituals because he had gone to Collegiate in the 1980s. And from him I learned how to “put on” my manhood in that slow ride from subterranean Brooklyn into the city. Whenever I saw him on the train, he had already shifted into his mode of defense. Although Mr. Smith’s personality was absolutely jovial and sunny, he had an Angry Black veneer suited just for the Manhattan private school environment. His long stunning locks tapered behind his shoulders, and ran down his back, seemingly sagged by his brooding. His gait was stiff, and his impeccably stylish tweed acted as a perfect camouflage by patterning his outer shell in neat lines and cross hatches. Whether it was a brown blazer with suede elbow pads matched with similar brown shoes, or a green collared shirt staggered by an auburn tie, Smitty was dressed for the occasion. He had casual style with an orderly layering. It was the sure embroidery of his hidden torment.

He spoke both lovingly of the place as an academic bastion, and contemptibly about its penchant for elitist bias. As an emigrant from Trinidad, he could also point to me, as the Jamaican-born student, when he wanted to orient himself or my classmates about just how alien an experience Collegiate was to most Americans. Not that he made sure to single me out in lectures, because in fact he made no notice of me that I did not bring upon myself. Instead, he would speak in drastic hyperbole about how spoiled and suckled the white students were, and then speak about his upbringing in both honorable and ashamed tones. I say ashamed because, despite his general pride about being The Other, he was rankled by the implications of admitting a lowly start to bratty rich kids.

Even so, he acted as my academic advisor and severe parental figure for most of my years there. I had little sense of myself (still don’t) during my time at Collegiate School, so when I became familiar with a hobby I enjoyed, I latched on to it immediately. Mr. Smith saw how much I loved to read, and in 8th grade I still had the sense of childish delight when the book fair came to school. I could scarcely afford the loads of books my classmates often carted away, but this circumstance made an astute shopper out of me. I grasped for the classics mostly. I knew that the literary canon was important to my development as a person, but could also serve me in the “suiting up” part of the experience. I already knew something of Richard Wright, because I had read Black Boy in the fifth grade. James Baldwin’s rhetoric chilled me with awe. But one day at the book fair — in the “Featured Authors” section no less — I spotted Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man stacked in paperback columns. After reading the back blurb, I pulled on Smitty’s arm, asking him what he thought of the book (because I was certain he’d read it).

“Ellison was not my favorite read,” he admitted “but it’s a necessary work.”

I wondered what about this Invisible Man made it a necessity. So I read it. I was strangely disappointed. I think Mr. Smith had inadvertently diminished my expectations, and because I leaned on him for examples of both intellectual command and emotional, I put the book down feeling confused. I had no idea what to make of the main character’s brushes with socialism, what to understand from his sexlessness, or of his anonymity. Opening a black novel or any piece of black fiction was a safety exercise to that point. I wanted to enfold myself within the themes of abjection and indigence. There is fine melancholy waiting for a young man in the pages of Langston Hughes, saccharine pain in Hurston and Morrison and perfect futility in Baldwin. Frustration bred fraternity, which then bred love. Ellison had none of this, or none on the surface level. Mr. Smith exhibited the visceral displeasures of an Other life, but I had yet to understand his Ellisonian aspect. There were times when his pointed silence stirred me much more than his sermons about how I should mature fast if I wanted to survive in this world. More telling than Mr. Smith’s reticence though was the underlying masking he was doing all throughout those train rides. He had effectively obscured his humanity and manhood, and ultimately changed something bright and forward in favor of something subtle and composed. As his charge, it pained me to see that, especially because I had no idea what kind of effort it took.

I was focused on being a boy or being an adolescent. I had not found a way to build honest manhood, so I searched in vain for ways to display practiced manhood, measured manhood. Black men have this shared experience of mask-ulinity, where the concealment of anguish and even joy can be a sword against the affronting world and a shield from it. These entries are an attempt to strip down my mask-ulinity for the purpose of establishing manhood. Deception (even the artful kind) can only beget more deception. Inasmuch as the black community has always commended itself for morphing at will, I must remove myself from that to find the essence of what I am. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man does this to great effect, but it crippled him because he lived the masking life all the same. He had gotten to the heart of what (he thought) makes a man, yet he could not live that existence. The fictive challenge met, his life was burdened in the same ways he had unshackled his protagonist. If I’m to learn from his life, it will require my acute attention to the construction of my mask, and the use of it up to this moment. How have I affected other men, younger and older, with my ways? How have I affected women? Does this matter? Just as the subway trains of my New York life emerge from the tunnels of unknown only briefly, so must I find ways to emerge for personal clarity. To live is to be underground. To live is to unknow.