Three Modes of History and CultureAmiri BarakaChalk mark sex of the nation, on walls we drummersknow as cathedrals. Cathedra, in a churning meat milk.Women glide through looking for telephones. Mapsweep and are mothers and their daughters listening tomusic teachers. From heavy beginnings. Plantations,learning America, as speech, and a common emptiness. Songs knocking inside old women's faces. Knocking through cardboard trunks.Trains leaning north, catching hellfire in windows, passing throughthe first ignoble cities of missouri, to illinois, and the pantingChicago.And then all ways, we go where flesh is cheap. Where factoriessit open, burning the chiefs. Make your way! Up through fog andhistoryMake your way, and swing the general, that it come flash openand spill the innards of that sweet thing we heard, and gave theoryto.Breech, bridge, and reach, to where all talk is energy. And theresenough, for anything singular. All our lean prophets and rhythms.Entirewe arrive and set up shacks, hole cards, Western hearts at the edgeof saying. Thriving to balance the meanness of particular skies.Raceof madmen and giants.Brick songs. Shoe Songs. Chants of open weariness.Knife wiggle early evenings of the wet mouth. Tonguedance midnight, any season shakes our house. Don'ttear my clothes! To doubt the balance of miseryripping meat hug shuffle fuck. The Party of InsaneHope, I've come from there too. Where the dead told liesabout clever social justice. Burning coffins votedand staggered through cold white streets listeningto Willkie or Wallace or Dewey through the dead faceof Lincoln. Come from there, and belched it out.I think about a time when I will be relaxed.When flames and non-specific passion wear themselvesaway. And my eyes and hands and mind can turnand soften, and my songs will be softerand lightly weight the air.