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I   All the real niggas are dead or in prison We are elaborating gently We are gooey in the middle The distance between those twin possibilities is Cartesian We know they will kill us, in small & flagrant ways Still, we follow breadcrumbs & hope for a dignified annihilation Slippery as newborn calves, we glisten We are fighting for the inalienable right to be ugly & still have an open casket We are loud about our pain & the world hates us for it We kill with the blunt instrument of kindness       II   Some people are born possessive nouns Some people leave & others stay Amal with the soft earlobes, the suppressed lisp Raspberry milkshakes at the park The skin on her knees like wild chanterelles foraged at dawn Recall the violet of her mood ring Forever stuck on the colour of asphyxiation We are suspicious of purple, Jarman wrote, it has a hollow bombast We found his words in the clammy belly of a Hampstead charity shop  His purple was exhibitionism, Hendrix, impish Prince, imperial tyranny, smut, the smell of Alexander the Great’s piss, luxury, a violation of decent taste Always, a passage Some people are drawn to the dusk of other interpretations Easter Funk Failure Christian repentance in violet robes Away from our cluttered sadness, Jarman wields his cane, bent like a prophet-in-waiting We are gassed up & drunk off our own subjectivity Terminally disappointed the way babygirls raised on prophets & rappers are bound to be Both die young & leave behind poor imitations We refuse to destroy ourselves to give meaning to your Order        III   During that inching hour just before Iftar, the holiest month was ushered in by IM chat sessions & notification alerts She moved to Cairo just in time for the revolution Like clockwork There we go again Blackness as centripetal force, as timekeeping beyond time, as magpie collation, as marooned miscellany, as an inventory under siege, as a mad ting, a wahala, a junoon, a reverie of blue-veined jinns, as a crush of meaning, a sodden map, a