At some point I became keenly aware
of my unhinged potential to be immersed
in the nothingness that follows,
you know what I mean? All bets
are on the dealer and that’s some
bullshit. This event may reproduce
itself, language says slant and lonely-like.
Thought I was a textured virtuoso,
thought I was spinning awake
and full of the overdue sense of being
which accompanies any self-determining
somebody out the mud of being named,
known, otherwise given a tone to resonate
inside of if you can feel me. I had this
disorienting sense that I could live
forever, I mean. Always locked in
a little melancholy, I didn’t mind it.
And before I slide too much
let me reiterate the contemporary forever
of the american negro, it’s depressing and
I’m proud of it, wouldn’t rather no other
galaxy in which yes I am manifold in
masks and thusly wolf-made and thrashed
about. No more do I pretend my beauty
isn’t ancient and ceaseless. In other words
I want my breath, not a speech about
my body. It is impressive in the dark and not
here. My love tends my secret as the lord
does a vast wood, spirit-filled and changing.
There is no direct conversion for this,
I’ll take my extravagances that keep me here.
Let me be here a little before I’m gone.
Taylor Johnson
Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a 2024 Whiting Award. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He is the Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland. With his wife, Elizabeth Bryant, Taylor curates the Green Way Reading Series at People’s Book in Takoma Park. Photocredit: S_an D Henry-Smith).
