RAPE POEMS (for C.C. and C.E.) #1 “the thing about it was, i knew the nigger” a “good” rape happens all the time, you know him it has been a good date or a bad one, you’re sober or slightly glowing or tipsy, rarely high or drunk, mostly straight awake at first he’s insistent, you say no, he hesitates but then the time comes, the bogart begins, the hands ruff on your body, the methodical pressure to make you give it up in the movies there is always this mean magical minute when each woman’s resistance melts, her semi-serious pleas of “no” and “don’t” turn to methodical breathing and clothes peeling off in soft piles of nylons & synthetics with a searing hot french kiss but this is not the movies all you feel is pain, as this man violates you, again and again it is not passion nor pleasure but pure physical pressure that forces your submission suddenly you are not even there, he is over your body in your body but you you are not even there, only, for truth you are there right there getting raped afterwards you wash yourself and douche but do not cry and seldom call the police, after all it happens to lots of women all the time, why feel sorry for yourself, you’ve been raped before and the thing about it is, you thought you knew the nigger #2 your husband, your lover, your duty it is no less a crime when he makes you do it, invoking the finalness of his fists the holiness of his husbandness the whoreness of your wifeness sailing smugly and nonchalantly through your body like as if his penis and a piece of paper (with some judge’s signature endorsed by the state) gives him omnipotent license and unlimited rights of passage through the waters of your vagina but then this rape (like most rapes in this society) this rape in the final analysis is legal. #3 few men know how it feels to get fucked to lay there and take it in and out when you don’t want to maybe in the prisons and behind bars when dudes turn out young males but on the streets and in the bedrooms, in back seats of cars and office suites around the world few men realize what rape really is —kalamu ya salaam