Balboa, the Entertainer

By Baraka, Amiri

I have braved for want of wild beasts steel cages...

It cannot come
except you make it
from materials
it is not
caught from. (The philosophers
of need, of which
I am lately
one,
will tell you. ``The People,''
(and not think themselves
liable
to the same
trembling flesh). I say now, ``The People,
as some lesson repeated, now,
the lights are off, to myself,
as a lover, or at the cold wind.

Let my poems be a graph
of me. (And they keep
to the line where flesh
drops off. You will go
blank at the middle. A
dead man.

        But
die soon, Love. If
what you have for
yourself, does not
stretch to your body's
end.
(Where, without
preface,
music trails, or your fingers
slip
from my arm