The New Black Avant-Garde (By Ronnie Mc Grath)... Loving IT!

DEAR POET

Why you write that neo-surrealist
Intertextual quiltwork of untreated fabulation stuff
That seems to make no sense
And gives me a headache trying to figure out
Why brothaz like you
Mr Ronnie McGrath
Anthony Joseph and Sun Ra
Be complicating things
And filling our headz with nonsense about
The African Origins of UFO’s
“Breaking out the sky like the indelible mark of a comet
Like an ankh”
Like the “Negro of my features is as absent as the pharaohs nose”
The “Provocative lips of your colouring pencils drowning in a watercolour”
Come on, man!
What’s that about?
Lets face it!
You brothaz be getting praised
Be getting paid for Nothin!
And now white people be laughing at us
Thinking that we have truly lost our mindz in an
Outpouring of a perpetual search for the new
Thinking our body of literature is penned by four year olds in kente-cloths with dashiki patterns
Thinking our music isn’t really music at all
Just a sound texture in search of form
YEAH!
Thanks to you
Ronnie McGrath
Thanks to you
Anthony Joseph
Thanks to you
Mr Kamau Braithwaite
Nathaniel Mackey
Bob Kaufman
Amiri Baraka
Clarence Major
Darius James
Ted Joans
Ornette Coleman
Cecil Taylor
Sun Ra
George Clinton
And the most out-there of you all (if there is such a thing in your feral bunch of Gypsies)
Mr Lee Scratch Perry and his “arkworks of inventions.”
“I’m a toaster, not a boaster” indeed
Come on, Scratch,
What the hell are you playin’ at?
It’s 2007, MAN!!!!!!!!!!!
Can you all make some fuckin’ sense – PLEASE!

Ronnie McGrath