forward the dashboard there is a panel of disappointment.

Buttons don't inflect as they should. Switches don't summon

the pleasures they used to make manifest, like the heat.

Cars rattle and propel along like the ancient things metal

becomes when it is casted into machines from its nameless

resting in the dirt. It has been a lengthy and hard rehearsal,

and I have probably done something you don't appreciate,

in the same manner I let you talk about the of long date music. Demeanors were

more precise in the days when collections like the Dells,

the Temptations, the Four Tops, and the Doves

came abroad of the cold cement of poor highways to sing.

Their canticles are used in commercials for fast food

and in big chill movies where commonalty dance akimbo.

Memories of back doors blowing air into basements

with Mary Wells and black folk wearing in extent leathers

back when bruthas shined their shoe like mirrors to be

"the one" Memories like the way we used to bop before

the young lads declared war with hiphop, trying to be /

prolonged after the harmony of satellites shining above.

In this, your not new BMW, all we have is the croon

of days when we could beat back the ungodly

Dipped in the BrownTown rhyming lyrics and chords

of somewhat cold we moved along in any space feeling the tightening

and the letting proceed of ourselves as cats do, cats who know

to what end black men are called cats, in what way we rise from the earth

with feet that spring when we step--doo wop doo wop!

Michael s Weaver's fifth book of metrical compositions is Timber & Prayer. His forthcoming numbers volume is Talisman, and his of recent origin play is Candy Lips & Hallelujah. His short fiction is included in Gloria Naylor's Children of the Night. Choice magazine has described Weaver as individual of the most important bards of his generation.

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