Rapping on Halloween

I.

We were in a room and the door could not be fully
opened because a chair blocked it and most of the people
had left when the blue lights like unwanted strobes pulsated
through windows and the haze of cigarette smoke
and in the beer spilled on the floor or poured as foam.
For perhaps twenty minutes we sat and there were these three
that were feeling pleased with themselves for having a mediocre
free-styling rap battle while I nodded my head in chemical bliss
and one of us who was less ambitious asked if they could throw out
some words about anything that was chosen, like my neighbor’s
New York Yankees hat, and they tried their best and it was formulaic
and eventually they exhausted themselves and I tapped my foot
as I swayed a little in my chair and I took a deep breath
and my voice was like running fingers through the hair
of someone condemned to death with a fate in the depths

and I said

II.

“That guy to my left just tossed a rhyme about shoes,
and just about that, like a criminal bruise,
about shooting motherfuckers like the Germans to Jews
and laying a lyrical track that read just like the news.

We were gonna talk about a fucking Yankee cap,
I can start with its colors, black on black,
or how its brim is straight or how it’s snug in the back
but I don’t really give much of a damn about that

I like how he talks about that chrome four-four
but I’m more interested in if he was ever poor,
if he ever had to sleep right on the goddamn floor,
if his mother ever got tossed through a door,

‘cause I know what he says cannot be true
or there would be no one for you to talk to
after their souls got tossed up into the blue
and humanity was like something Picasso drew.

III.

“And the man to my right he is Mexican,
and the man to his right is African,
and I know that we say that a man’s a man
but I gotta question that, when in a foreign land

there are priests with the power of death and of life
and the Catholic Church reads the people their rights
as they tell them that condoms spread HIV/AIDS
and to quit all that fucking is an easy band-aid

that we can just pull off, like wrath or like sloth,
or gluttony, avarice, and all of that stuff
that got banned by a man that sits on a throne.
Don’t forget his predecessors crushed people with stones

or that they burned them alive or killed them with swords
or threw them in prison, like they did to the whores
who were just gonna make a little hard money,
and if it wasn’t true maybe it would be funny

to recount this verbose history with vapid MC’s
who sit on couches and pretend to be free
and with sub-par hooks they try and coach me
to believe in someone that they cannot be,

these legends of hands grasping pistol grips
and a dangerous temper like the master’s bullwhip.
Do you know anything about what’s real in the world,
or are your words like love stories you tell to the girls

that you don’t care about? You’re so goddamn hard,
like making a house from a deck of thin cards,
but in your eyes is a person who’s been alone,
who lived a long time without a house or a home,

and I wonder about the edge on your claws
and if you will dull them trying to climb up walls
to avoid all the things that you cannot back up
or if, instead, you just don’t give a fuck.

Now you’ve got a position on this rap’s chessboard
but I can sense that our friends here are all getting bored
so I’ll wrap this in plastic high up on a shelf
and see how much more you talk about yourself

instead of the vote in California
for the legalization of marijuana
or the hatred of our brothers who only love men
or our sisters hated for just loving women

but maybe that shit doesn’t matter much at all,
like the hungry kids that you shrug at in the halls
of the buildings where you sell their young mothers crack,
and I wonder if you ever bother looking back,

or if you just make that money like the paint on the floor
that no one can clean. If it’s there, it’s yours.
Now I’m back at his hat, so if it’s back it’s back.
Where the fuck in this house can I find a dime sack?”

IV.

I had silenced them and our souls were set afire.
I left the room, wedged through the barely open space,
and I saw her face. Her name was palindromic
and she said she was a marionette but her corset
would have caused envy in Madame Antoinette
and her face was pale with the spirit of the day
and on each side of her mouth were black lines like tears
or tears in her skin and she twisted her left ankle when she spoke.

I left shortly after making her acquaintance. I walked
home in the dark of the cardboard clouds on beds of dead leaves
and I kicked their drying doom at barking dogs and dared the demons
to give me kisses on such an auspicious morning but my lips were
hollow with the wind and then I was alone again.