Poetry by Willie Wilson
Beats
When I think about getting older,
I think about something I read online
that said listening to loud music
can cause permanent hearing loss
& when I think about that kind of loss,
I think about how when I put on my Beats,
I can muffle any background sound & then
I think about losing myself to music
the way that Marvin’s symphony of smoothness
can move the eardrums in the direction
of sugar, how an old soul
can sprout from the tunes of a classic
& then I think about how all those years ago
I wish I had some noise cancelling
headphones every time my father
would beat my mom
with his words because somehow I always
knew his hands would find a way to cut in;
that time dad got mad when he thought
mom wasn’t listening the exact way he wanted,
I imagined myself covering my ears
with Barney’s I Love You song because that night
I needed to extract the idea of love by any means
or maybe I just needed to turn the sounds
of knuckles slamming into flesh
into the idea of listening to Marvin,
to transform the tracks of her broken
idea of a husband into something else
back then I only wish it were as simple
as slipping on some Beats by Dre
& washing away everything
I never wanted to see.
The Total Sum of Squares
(can be written: Total SS = W + B
can be imagined as: Total SS = White + Black)
Written after thinking of Eric Garner being killed by a policeman for selling loose cigarettes/squares
The first time I said I couldn’t breathe
he pressed the sum of his weight
around my neck so hard I thought
I could hear my spine scream. Crazy
how the direction of a soul can be slingshot
from a chokehold. I couldn’t breathe I said—
in the center of the oblong. circle
he created, while the eyes of cell phones
watched without blinking. I can’t breathe. I said it
again, and his heavy breaths taunted me.
How silly it all seems. Truth is:
if I could go back to before whatever
circumstance pulled me close to the suspicion
spun around me, I would. I can’t
breathe. I remember how it felt, inside
that carousel of hate, just before I felt my selves
begin to double— I gave my breath to the white
of heaven, seared, raw and permanent.
