Keep Me Bright-Smiling
Don’t worry, Mr. President: You are not America. We cherish you, but we shall remind ourselves of something important. We shall remember – by examining your work and words and examples – that our hopes for our civic lives do not have to involve you. That lie has lasted too many years.
Two weeks in, there is your nomination and
The slouched dig, shove of my thoughts plowing American
Plains arid of care, chore, and yield.
Two weeks into our adolescing acquaintance, just two weeks
Into your toothsome hello, it sometime happened
That you caught me smiling back.
I tell you sniveling, I live in the basement of our House—
In its dank, my thoughts meander, hide like roaches
And the mildew funk stoppers my nose, my lungs, my heart slow-beating.
I am cold in my youth. Often
I do not know what is going on.
“Is it my fault?” I ask the walls.
I squirm with the question
(Imagine gassed dogs in dumpsters).
I know what I am good for but have not had time to say.
Speech is my madman locked in a cell.
Railed layers bar my inmate tongue from his lips,
And my shivering arms cannot pry the cold rot with a steel.
Yet, arms tingling, I twist and stretch for the warmth removed
And from between my teeth
Now steal a glimmer with fat toothpicks.
I am no longer mortal-cold and blue-lipped
As I have time, I have place to say
My smile is opened. For, the tale turns,
I do not forget that I have things to scream
I do not forget that I have things to smile for
I do not forget that I do not do all things alone.
I made no promises to the Black dentist or messiah
Whose warm fingers lift my cheeks from the inside,
Though he made promises to me.
He told me I would not rot again, and I believed him.
Ten months later I still hang a crescent from my ears;
Ten months later I still show myself my teeth.
I do not understand it all, and I cannot always see—
But I salute you my dentist:
You have lifted me into my House, where the others have returned.
Because, two weeks in, you exalted promise
And ten months later I still have faith,
I have hope; I scream I smile.
ear President Obama,
I think your Nobel Prize has a touch of the absurd, but I don’t care. Your perfection represents our own. If you are the palette from which we no longer paint beige vacancies, from which America questions itself by painting new and lively impressions, then I am proud. If your prize is a testament to that, and not just a messianic anointment, then I am happy.
