called "doo wop dream"
dedicated to gwendolyn brooks, june jordan, and toni cade bambara
....the story is too long to post really,



She tried hard not to, but she remembered. Those girls were bad. Anybody could tell you how bad they were and everybody did. There wasn’t a woman who could out dress them, a man who could out smart them. And they knew it too. 127th street waited for gwen, and june, and toni to get up each morning and get the block going. Women waited for the bus with them, children made it to school because of them, and dope fiends dreamed dreams of doo wop where the only jones was song, and so the girls sang all day and all night long just to calm the aching in their veins.

~
Lena was not a punk, she was a just funny looking girl. Her hair was unusually long for such a dark child and her eyes told of something other than blk mixed in her blood. She was not fat or thin, short or tall. She just seemed to be there, on the corner listening to the doo wop sisters do their thang. Those girls were bad, and Lena wanted to be bad too. She wanted to be a doo wop sister, with no mother and no father, just a voice and a reason and stories to tell. She wanted to sing from her window, and the stoop, and the corner, and into the ear of a man with lots of promises and nice teeth and a big car and shiny shoes. She wanted to sing the song of Harlem, she wanted a big butt and thighs that curved and moved and glowed and kept the attention of her people. She wanted to be a doo wop sister, and boogie down streets that offered everything one could never use.

~

“How long you been writing?,” questioned Gwen. “Long enough,” sang the funny looking little girl. “Well I think you got something here sweeter than cornbread and better than hot sauce little mama,” said June. “Only thing is, if you don’t never talk to nobody, wont nobody never hear you,” commented Toni. The girl shifted her weight to the other side of the body, uncomfortable that all of the girls were looking at her at once. “We’ll sing em, as long as you keep writing them like this,” Gwen offered from over the girl’s head, “The minute you start talking all that jive shit that don’t mean shit, we gonna stop singing.” Claudia knew the girls to be gospel, and so she kept writing her Harlem poems, and the doo wop sisters kept singing Harlem’s songs.

~

was it really time for u to go?
time to lay down for a poet’s death,
time for words to resurrect and souls to write no more?
was it really time for u to go,
when so many seeds have not yet been turned over
and the ground is too cold to dig?
when summer yields winter winds & I fall in love
all the time so much I cant find myself and I don’t recognize myself,
was it really time for u to go?
how many search to find nothing
when the answers were written in ur faces
& now ure buried & gone
and the truth is no longer here to look at.
if u wldve stayed we cldve played numbers
and practiced dance steps, if u wldve stayed we cldve
grew up and been harlem & indiana & charleston & upstate.
we clda humped in the back seats & got perms & summer jobs
& fresh kicks and enemies to laff at. if u wldve stayed I wldnt be so lonely
& we cldve eaten sugar daddies & bbq chips & picked fites
we cldve wrote together about all the fked up ppl
and all the fked up shit and the sky and the babies
and the puerto ricans and the skewl system and dead poets and
dead bodies and where we grew up and our daddies
& the system
& the condition
& the prisons
& the hate
& the prejudice
& jazz & rock
and new skewl & old skewl
and God
and dee jays and proms
and lipstick
and subways
and being blk
if u wldve stayed we clda wrote poems about
being blk
and God
and love
and fking
and God
just all the time.
we clda been all the time.
on time.
fly ass bitches
just blk
and God
and love
and us.