Amiri Baraka - Three Modes of History and Culture lyrics

THREE MODES OF HISTORY AND CULTURE Chalk mark s** of the nation, on walls we drummers know as cathedrals. Cathedra, in a churning meat milk. Women glide through looking for telephones. Maps weep and are mothers and their daughters listening to music teachers. From heavy beginnings. Plantations, learning America, as speech, and a common emptiness. Songs knocking inside old women's faces. Knocking through cardboard trunks. Trains leaning north, catching hellfire in windows, pa**ing through the first ignoble cities of missouri, to illinois, and the panting Chicago. And then all ways, we go where flesh is cheap. Where factories sit open, burning the chiefs. Make your way! Up through fog and history Make your way, and swing the general, that it come flash open and spill the innards of that sweet thing we heard, and gave theory to. Breech, bridge, and reach, to where all talk is energy. And theres enough, for anything singular. All our lean prophets and rhythms. Entire we arrive and set up shacks, hole cards, Western hearts at the edge of saying. Thriving to balance the meanness of particular skies. Race of madmen and giants. Brick songs. Shoe Songs. Chants of open weariness. Knife wiggle early evenings of the wet mouth. Tongue dance midnight, any season shakes our house. Don't tear my clothes! To doubt the balance of misery ripping meat hug shuffle f**. The Party of Insane Hope, I've come from there too. Where the dead told lies about clever social justice. Burning coffins voted and staggered through cold white streets listening to Willkie or Wallace or Dewey through the dead face of Lincoln. Come from there, and belched it out. I think about a time when I will be relaxed. When flames and non-specific pa**ion wear themselves away. And my eyes and hands and mind can turn and soften, and my songs will be softer and lightly weight the air.