the ending to a long ass poem that got away from me but was able to recover…

…

9. 

the poet on trial is acquitted (ode to a clean slate)

i told you fuckers i didn’t do it. now
w-what, again, even was the charges?!?

• 2 counts possession of unlicensed freeverse w/ intent to internet  
• 2 counts of pen-handling 
• 1 count soliciting unsafe text within 500 feet of a small press.
• 1 count possession of bookbinding stapler and 2 reams of newsprint with intent to chapbook
• gobs and gobs counts of journaling while non-academic outside a pre-assigned genre.
• 12 counts of doodling in book margins.

well… yeah. yeah. i did all that. 
goddamn, yall almost got me; whew, that shit was close.
yall must suck at this… but fareal tho… fareal, fareal… 

it’s no mean feat, no soft miracle, 
being an un-credentialed poet with no professional youtube
and hardly 300 followers in 5 years of instagram; no graduating 
mfa class to exchange photobombs with, no artsy literary collective
to disband with once fame is gained and jealousy dampens…

i’ve worn, in sullen dreams, the mammoth’s head and
the centaur’s bottom hunting ovids of Africa in autumn… 
avoiding Narcissus and Invidia and the Vestal Virgins 
where the trend is to CGI Circe in broken rhyme,
to place her in a Cubs cap (after nightclub) at the Waffle House,
the Whore House, in the White House’s nuclear bunker… 
but i’m never one to linger on the likes of Hera or the love life
of Amphitrite nor on Antheia’s green thumb… i’m rooted
in an invisible missive, a magnetic juju / behind 
this palisade of constellations, this Inzalo Y’Langa, i am most
at home reclaiming my divinity in this birthplace of the sun. 

in this birthplace of the sun, i am the gardener of ghosts.