THESE MORAL CURRENTS CUT

Half my bad childhood racial memories happened

at middle-school dances. The blond boy who snatched

the fresh Malcolm X hat off my head, threw it down

into a dancefloor mess of fruit punch & gritty footprints,

& told me you’re not black—stop pretending. (Entire careers

made of upholding that line when we refuse to run patrol

for them.) At another dance, I was ringed by leering

white faces that belted out, It don’t matter if you’re black

or white. I wasn’t sure what those faces meant, but I knew

they meant to hurt. I’ve never held that lyric against Michael

Jackson. I do find, though, listening to his old albums,

those Jackson 5 records with cuts like “Never Can Say

Goodbye,” has gotten hard. These days I know how that story

ends: the descent into dysmorphic madness, the predatory

doors bolted and shut behind boys, one stolen childhood

thieving another. My better angels think it’s wrong

to separate the art from the artist. I hated learning

Pound in school when we all knew he was a Fascist

& anti-Semite. He should have stayed locked

in the gorilla cage of his hate. But then I admit Miles Davis

has lodged brass notes irrevocably under my fifth rib,

and some of those notes he bent while blacking & bluing

Cicely Tyson. (Cicely goddamn Tyson . . .) & on the night MJ

died, I danced to his music in a circle of dancers until my shirt

was sweat-stuck to my chest, until I stank with grief.

I didn’t know then all that disgusts me now —the doors,

the boys—but the hard truth is: if the King of Pop died today,

I don’t think I could stop myself from letting hips sway

to music that, especially in the writhing all-night body rock

of a house party but even in my mother’s halting soprano,

pushes past joy to abandon. These moral currents cut the other

way too: the blond boy who snatched the “X” hat off my head,

when a young man, walked into a gas-station store to find a woman

being beaten by her boyfriend, & when the blond boy went to stop

him, the boyfriend ignited a lighter & touched it to the boy’s shirt,

which burned until it curled into a sneer & then stuck to his white skin.