Trash
What critics throw away I love the more;
I love to stoop and look among the weeds,
To find a flower I never knew before
-John Clare
One man's waste is another man's soap / Son's fan base know the brother man's dope
-MF DOOM
I knew life
Started from where I stood in the dark,
Looking out into the light,
& that sometimes I could see
Everything through nothing.
-Yusef Komunyakaa
I
All the men I loved were dead
-beats by birthright or so the legend
went. The ledger said three
out of every four of us were
destined for a cell or lead
shells flitting like comets
through our heads. As a boy,
my mother made me write
& sign contracts to express
the worthlessness of a man's
word. Just like your father,
she said, whenever I would lie,
or otherwise warp the historical
record to get my way. Even then,
I knew the link between me
& the old man was pure
negation, bad habits, some awful
hyphen filled with blood. I have half
my father's face & not a measure of his flair
for the dramatic. Never once
have I prayed & had another man's wife
wail in return. Both burden & blessing alike,
it seemed, this beauty he carried
like a dead doe. No one called him Father
of the Year. But come wintertime, he would wash
& cocoa butter us until our curls shone like lodestone,
bodies wrapped in three layers
of cloth just to keep December's iron
bite at bay. And who would have thought
to thank him then? Or else turn
& expunge the record, given all we know
now of war & its unquantifiable cost,
the way living through everyone around you
dying kills something elemental, ancient.
At a certain point, it all comes back
to survival, is what I am saying.
There are men he killed to become
this man. The human brain is a soft
gray cage. He doesn't know what else
he can do with his hands.
II
The Knicks were trash. Head colds
at the outset of a South Bronx summer:
trash. The second hour after she is gone,
the moment the song you both used to slow
-dance through the kitchenette
to comes on, moving on: all trash.
Death is trash. Love is a robust engagement
with the trash of another.
Monthly bills of any kind are trash,
although access to gas and electricity
is not, so there is that to consider.
Blackouts are incontrovertibly
trash. Much like student loans, or the fact
that we live in a culture of debt such that one
must always be behind to make some semblance
of what our elders might have called living.
My friends often state in the midst of otherwise
loving group chat missives that life is trash, though
we all keep trying to make one for some reason
or another, and the internet says my friends are trash,
that black men and boys are trash, and it makes me think
of the high Germanic roots of garbage-which
is perhaps the first cousin of trash-that part of the animal
one does not eat, and we are sort of like that, no?
Modernity's refuse, disposable flesh
and spectacular failure, fuel and fodder,
corpses abundant as the trash
on the floor of the world.
Aging is trash. I am years past thirty now
and so any further time qualifies
as statistical anomaly,
you can't expect good
results with bad data, trash
in, trash out, they say,
and I'm really just searching
for better, more redemptive
language is the thing,
some version of the story
where all the characters
inside look like me and every
single one of us escapes
with our heads.
III
Saturdays, it was my job to pick the bones
from cans of fish which became the unwieldy
piles of pink flesh that, once fried, became the cakes
we ate for dinner that night, breakfast the next
day, dinner again to close the loop. Decades passed
before I saw the beast in real time, realized, like Baldwin-
who once saw his mother lift a yard of velvet, say
that is a good idea, and for months thought ideas were shocks
of black fabric-that salmon lived outside
the bounds of Foodtown shelves
we searched for deals in the early '90s,
supermarket circulars held tight
in our too-small hands, armaments
against American cost. Older now,
a literary type with insurance
to boot, I tell you this story
at our kitchen table, unsure of what
I am trying to convey, exactly.
Something about the flexible
nature of human knowledge,
perhaps: a speed course in semiotics
over poached eggs. Or maybe
some version of the same tale
I am always telling, that the wall
between the world & me
grew weaker once I left
what I loved. Children
of the poor, their small words
& smaller sense of scale.
Back then, life on Earth
was Yonkers, NY,
& my grandmother's salon.
Every leather-bound book
was a Word of God. And there I was,
an affront to history, creative, even
in my ignorance, sketching planets
in the air as my big sister sang soul outside
my bedroom window, her voice
like something ancient and winged,
pulling summer into being.
IV
(CROWN OF THORNS)
The American Negro is an invention. He innovates
& endarkens our innermost visions of the human
species. The American Negro is an intervention.
He is interdisciplinary & interstellar; intellectually
amphibious, indiscriminately savage. Indeed,
The American Negro is, on average, quite humorous,
if only indirectly. Most often he is more so akin
to automata, a kind of rudimentary artificial intelligence
in its infancy. Even still, the American Negro is, in most cases,
indefatigable. An infinite resource. His anguish, infinitesimal.
His aspirations? Indiscernible. Just imagine: an invincible
apparition. An invaluable addition to the instruments
in the shed. The indomitable soul of the Negro is an impulse
toward abolition, some dead man somewhere wrote
in a book that I once read. Off with his head, they said.
They said books were the way through the brook of fire
blackness was, so my boys & I steeped ourselves in
whatever Ivy League library shelves lent us in our late
teens, early twenties, until we sparkled proper articulate
doctor of philosophy, master's, pastor, preacher, poet, scholar
of arts & human sciences, trained by institutional schemes
geared toward certain kinds of compliance, aesthetic & other
-wise, my brothers shine brightest when the lights are on.
Politics honed by threat & adoration. Theft of language
named primary education named home training named lower
your tone don't say that about the ones who love you enough
to put up with such arrogance as a matter of course of course
you are martyr messiah gangster never survivor son somebody's
baby boy beyond the age of five or six you see the signs
of life you cannot ever own you know the way it is.
You know the way it was back then: futility in any direction,
we figured, unless you hooped or had bars like X or Jay,
a recording booth you could use to spin those imagined lines
of verse, urgent as the discourse of markets that would one day
dart across our screens, into poetry no one knew by that name.
Or lawyers, perhaps, since we cherished argument above all
other forms. Or preachers like my uncle, who drove a midnight
-blue Mercedes, spoke with a voice that was its own object & force,
solid as the side of a destroyer. Never let them say we were aimless.
Amidst Hennessy altars & tall tees adorned with faces of boys made
ancestors by casual misunderstandings, we cast images into the air
of lives we had only heard tell of via network TV, contraband
lyrics pulled from dial-up sessions that lasted hours before
parents came home to kick us off the line, jettison the crew
back into worlds where words had an irrevocable heft to them
& we were mortal again & anonymous no longer.
Several notches above anonymous. Ella Fitzgerald
hails from Yonkers. We shed the 2 train, kept
our debt. Middle-class intentions fail in Yonkers. I left.
Wrung my hands. Got a therapist. Medicated heads
prevail in Yonkers. Whole Foods? Does not compute.
Even our hunger is loyal. It's 1999. No Jamba Juice
or kale in Yonkers. My father is a star. Prayed the pews
to tears last week. Once, his love, it lifted me. Then
my faith in blood grew frail. In Yonkers, I bloomed:
a manageable stain. Bodies falling maim the night.
Fistfights gone off the rails. We have no sense
of scale in Yonkers. The letter flew like a ghost
in a ghost costume through the front door.
A scholarship: my last piece of mail in Yonkers.
My last piece of mail last year was a book of poems by Denis Johnson
named in honor of the artist James Hampton, who built a sculpture
from tinfoil & cardboard big enough to fill a room, which it does, even
as I write this, it looms gargantuan over its own space in the Smithsonian,
labeled in accordance with its grandeur & glamour, its luminous gold
& aluminum grammar, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium
General Assembly, which is the only known work of art Hampton crafted
in his 55 years on Earth, the latter part of which he labored as a janitor,
night after night, gathering metal for a masterwork he built in secret, a scene
almost Vulcanic, hammering in the silent darkness of a Washington,
D.C., garage miles away from where the work would one day stand, first
discovered by a landlord on the hunt for overdue rent, the irony of which
merits consideration elsewhere, perhaps, yet I am here, first, to celebrate
James, the tireless genius, his throne built not only, you see, from what
most would call garbage, detritus, unworthy or nothing at all, but dreams
like a second flesh no earthly weapon formed against him could kill.
General consensus in our home was candy or soda could kill us,
or else rot our constitutions in some larger, metaphysical sense.
Body & soul, to cite the old wisdom. In protest, my big sister
& I would sneak the stuff through customs whenever we could:
Swedish Fish & ginger beer, Kit Kats, Mary Janes & Malta
lining the sides of each pocket like the contraband spoils
they were, smallest joys, our solitary arms in this war against
the invisible wall our parents built to bar the world of dreams.
Now that we are older, the mystery is all but gone. We were poor.
Teeth cost. In the end, it was the same as any worthwhile
piece of ancient lore: love obscured by law, our clumsy hands
demanding heaven, forgetting the bounty in our bellies,
the miracles our mother made from Jiffy mix & cans
of greens, all the pain we never knew we never knew
held there, against our will, in the citadel of her care.
In the citadel of her care, we grew tall. Memorized verses
from the King James Bible, the evidence of things not seen
all around us each day. Here, I learned to separate the plane
of what I could hear & smell from the landscape our mother
traversed in visions, though it was as real to me as new weather:
cold made visible by breathing, heat so high in June a crisp
dollar for AriZona iced tea seemed to me a vast fortune.
I had never pondered the long history of credit, barter, fiat,
& trade, though I knew there was a power money claimed
over us that was almost unnameable, appeared only in phrases:
Con Edison is not our friend, she said, when I left a light on for
too long, or the well-worn classic, but do you have McDonald's
money? Even there, I now hear a tenderness I could not before,
her making sure I knew my true home was in another realm,
another life, beyond our temporary house by the trees.
I bought a house by the trees to feel properly integrated,
whole, to cover the gaps in my long-standing
argument with our era of metal & light.
A man of the city turned back to the woodland life
not for peace, but a meaningful portion of entropy: rabbits
sprinting in pairs across the street, half-grown deer leap
-frogging bottles of Amstel behind our community
garden, where someone's responsible parents grow
squash & snap peas to honor the vanishing
world of living things no louder than the sound
of insects whimpering in their dust-sized sorrows.
You can feel the invincible bond of everything
if you just take a minute. If when the emptiness beckons,
you can leap into the blackness of its call.
Attack, balderdash, blackness (they call from the rafters), blather
-skite, claptrap, codswallop, crap, a dollop of damns in generally
pristine prose or speech, drivel, dross, effluvia, fiddle-faddle, flap
-doodle (a personal favorite), folderol, garbage, guff, hogwash,
hokum, horsefeathers (you can almost envision Pegasus mid-flight),
humbug, imitation (not the thing itself but the accusation), jazz, junk,
kaput, lambast, loss, malarkey, mass entertainment, mass incarceration's
psychic aim (a problem isn't real if you no longer see it), muck, mush,
nonsense, nuts, oblivion, piffle, poppycock, quagmire, refuse, rubbish,
slush, tommyrot, tosh, trash (as in the everyday phenomenon but
also talk), twaddle, undercard (ostensibly), underdog (mentally,
you recite their harms before the fight begins), vilipend, wreckage,
excess, extra, yak, youth that cannot be used, zip, zero, easy.
Zero chance we dodge the pernicious myth of ethical excess, easy
money everywhere, without the influence of various underpaid saints,
some in places you might expect, like Mrs. Riggs in Sunday school,
who taught us Truth cut in more than one direction, said Scripture was both
law & mythos, stories to act out in vibrant color (costumes & all) & breath
of God to weigh in community, or Mr. Bernard, local librarian, who taught
me to navigate the stacks at ten with maps I then committed to memory, or
Ms. Simms, who wrote comments on my report card like Joshua Bennett is a witty
elocutionist & I had no idea what that meant, so I looked it up in the big red
Webster's beside my bed because that is what my mother made me do
whenever I was faced with the unfamiliar & the unfamiliar was everywhere
those years, on campus, when Ms. Anita swiped us into the dining hall
knowing we were broke & would be for at least two more days before
the work-study check kicked in, & thus rescued us, is what I am trying
to say to anyone who will listen, the jaws of the thresher were thrown
wide open & they were what stood, masterless, unkillable, in its way.
Some of these microscopic invertebrates shrug off temperatures
of minus 272 Celsius, one degree warmer than absolute zero.
Copyright © 2022 by Joshua Bennett. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
