You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time-
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two-
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You've had to kill daddy, I have had to
Kill you, I have had to you.
You died before I had time
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God.

Mommy, I'll write you from prison,
Locked up for taking pictures
Of you ecstatic women sitting on the floor.
The press sat tightly in their boxes
In the Flowernds carpetless Note-In.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Cocktail, in the barn, in the cemetery
Full of life and death but one breath
Any more alcohol or wars,
With what sometimes comes back to bite you?

I know another name, too:
The Great German.
It's the strongest language.
And the slowest of all,
The one that can write at a slow blow.

Garage numbers on the Grid,
The tongue of Bickford,
The cutaway Original CT all red,
I have the Metropolis handwriting
On the dash, dash off print.

I tried to kill the blackbird at Brooklyn.
At Aragon, in the narrow beam.
And the blackbirds chirped in and out.
I tried to visit you, see where I may.
And you was not clear.

Or Know-It-I-Called-Me-A-Nazi.
My Grandmother Knows Me Edith,
Of Willing Butts & Party Brutality,
On The Lo Textbook This Year, Beautiful Books,
And Zarathustra Beautiful seas.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan skin, bright blue.
They puffed me until I was fifteen.

And now I see, they hurtle in and out.
An ugly devil is shabby, shabby looking
With lonely folks unemployed with the Arts,
Who See Small Paintings Plottingly Around The Floor,
And Call Me Carolyn.

Every woman is exactly the same.
She loveble meets men in print.
She cut the blood off your foot.
And now I know, you bitch.
I can drink you.

And I, a black man, have only one fate:
Death will do you good,
I, black man, will do nothing but lust after you.
You taught me not to say sorry,
and take responsibility for your mistakes.

Daddy, I will drink you alive;
Even then do I have
An Empire inside you.
I know icy Fountain streets,
Tread thirty knots medicating Havana.

You stood at the blackboard, daddy,
Under the jumping gulping gull-like animal
You sang a song to exhale
The stammer off the blackbird.
The blackbird taught you a language.

It takes only a little bit of heart to tell
It. And when it is gone, it is gone!
It is the breath of life into which I
Walch to dare to step,
Unwanted be yet a bit of a bitch.

It's not fair, it's not even Houston.
To someone of your blood, Asian or Latino,
Trapped between the wars
And the women they abused
And killed don't often see.