parked on gravel and broken glass and rocks and they should
have better and they know it but they don’t and they w o n ’t
and later they get to use the guns, somewhere, the city’s full o f
fast black boys who get separated from the pack; and you hear
the fuck, shit, asshole, o f the basketball players as a counterpoint to the solitary fuck, shit, asshole, o f the lone cops as they emerge from their cars, they put down their heavy legs and
their heavy feet in their bad old shoes, all worn, chewed
leather, and they pull themselves out o f their old cars, and
they’re tired men, overweight, there ain’t many young ones at
all, and there’s a peculiar sadness to them, the fascists are
melancholy in Gotham, they say fuck, shit, asshole, like it’s
soliloquies, like it’s prayers, like it’s amen, like it’s exegesis on
existence, like it’s unanswered questions, urgent, eloquent,
articulated to God; lonely, tired old Nazis, more like Hamlet,
though, than like Lear, introspective from exhaustion, not
grand or arrogant or merciless in delusion; and the boys hurl
the ball like it’s bombs, like it’s rocks and stones, like it’s
bullets and they’re the machines o f delivery, the weapons o f
death, machine guns o f flesh, bang bang bang, each round so
fast, so hard, as the ball hits the ground and the boy moves
with it, a weapon with speed up its ass; and they’re a choir o f
fuck, shit, asshole, voices still on the far edge o f an adolescent
high, not the raspy, cigarette-ruined voices o f the lonely, sad
men; the boys run, the boys sing the three words they know, a
percussive lyric, they breathe deep, skin and viscera breathe,
everything inside and outside breathes, there’s a convulsion,
then another one, they exhale as if it’s some sublime soprano
aria at the Met, supreme art, simple, new each time, the air
comes out urgent and organized and with enough volume to
fill a concert hall, it’s exhilarating, a human voice, all the words
they don’t know; and the cops, old, young, it don’t matter,
barely breathe at all, they breathe so high up in the throat that
the air barely gets out, it’s thin and depressed and somber, it’s
old and it’s stale and it’s pale and it’s flat, there’s no words to it
and no music, it’s a thin, empty sound, a flat despair, Hamlet
so old and dead and tired he can’t even get up a stage whisper.
The cops look at the boys, each cop does, and there’s this
second when the cop wants to explode, he’d unleash a grenade
in his own hand if he had one, he’d take him self with it if it
meant offing them, fuck them black boys’ heads off, there’s
this tangible second, and then they turn away, each one,
young, old, tight, sagging, each one, every day, and they pull
themselves up, and they kick the rocks, the broken glass, the
gravel, and they got a hand folded into a fist, and they leave the
parking lot, they walk big, they walk heavy, they walk like
John Wayne, young John, old John, big John, they walk slow
