Free Mr. West by Sarah Blake

JESUS WALKS
    This poem could start, “I love you,” instead of ending there.
It could start, “Music.”
    The key to this poem is connecting this sentence,
    Â Â          
    from the lyrics of Kanye’s “Jesus Walks”
    to this sentence,
    Show ’em the wounds
    from a making of video that follows
the making of the third music video
for “Jesus Walks.”
    Kanye said, after the first two videos, “I still felt like I didn’t have the hood, and that’s what Jesus walks for, it’s for the hood.”
    I can think, have thought, of great line breaks for that quote. Already had to think of punctuation.
    The man who said, “Show ’em the wounds,” is, I imagine, a friend of Kanye’s. But Kanye’s not around for this:
    â€œI’m here with my n****, Romeo, looking smooth and shit. You know what I’m saying. Official, n****. How many times you got shot?”
    â€œNine,” he’s grinning and lifts up his shirt.
    â€œNine times goddamnit, and he ain’t even no rapper, bitch.” Pause. “I’m with my other n****,” the man to his left, “how many times you got shot, n****? Tell ’em.”
    â€œFive times.”
    â€œShow ’em the wounds. Show ’em the wounds, show ’em the wounds.” And he adds, “I ain’t never got shot but my n****s did.”
    Stars all across my paper. Stars when I look at something blindingly beautiful. When I fall. When I first learn of stars.
    Someone on the production crew yells out, “Come on in pigeon holders.” Someone says, “I got dirt and blood standing by.”
    Many voices behind Kanye’s repeat, “Jesus walks.”
    An actor—the one lit on fire for the video, the one carrying a cross big enough to carry him—says to the camera, “I hope people take it the right way.”
    My favorite music video of the three has this man in it.
    Maybe for the fire behind Kanye that rises and recedes in that hallway like the breath.
    Maybe because when the police cut open a pack of cocaine in the trunk of a car filled with packs of cocaine, a dove comes out, shaking powder from its head. I count at least fifteen flying from the trunk.
    A woman sings that she wants Jesus with the fullest lips I’ve seen in years, a voice like no woman I know.
    I believe in her, in Kanye.
    But what is it when I believe bullets leave the shapes of stars?
    Kanye, if only I could write a poem for you and not about you.

THE WEEK KANYE JOINED TWITTER
    We find there are fewer dinosaurs
when we learn how the skulls age.
Shifting horns, bones that thin
and smooth, holes that form like
some desires do. Changes we
couldn’t anticipate, knowing mostly
our simple, fusing domes.
    You begin tweeting.
    I learn about your suits, videos,
jets, pillows, the new words you
picked up overseas. You take
a picture of your diamond
and gold teeth. You make a joke
about a crown so lovely I see
it on nymphs in daydreams.
    Sometimes I see
    my curly head of hair outlined in
the morning dark and think I’m
the lovechild of actresses and lions.
But today I see the functionality
of my face and not whether
I’m beautiful. I’m so very animal.
I remember and flare my nostrils.

KANYE’S DIGESTIVE SYSTEM
    This I taught to a sixth grader—
    mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large
intestine, rectum, anus
    â€”but there’s so much more to it than that.
    The bile from the liver.
    The sections of the small intestine—
    duodenum, jejunum, ileum.
    The sections of the large intestine—
    ascending colon, transverse colon, descending colon .
    And some go so far as to note the sigmoid colon .
    Wikipedia says,
    of this in particular,
    â€œnormally lies within the pelvis,
    but on account
    of its freedom of movement
    it is liable to be displaced”
    Oh god, the uneasy organs.
    All the sphincter muscles (just like the ones in our