Each morning the radio comes on at seven o'clock.
Sometimes Michael Jackson is singing that A-B-C
is as easy as 1-2-3
or Sly and the Family Stone are thanking us for
letting them
be themselves.
Sometimes it's slower music, the Five Stairsteps
telling us
things are going to get easier, or the Hollies singing,
He ain't heavy, he's my brother
So on we go...
My mother lets us choose what music we want
to listen to
as long as the word funk doesn't appear anywhere
in the song.
But the summer I am ten, funk is in every single song
that comes on the cool black radio stations. So our
mother makes us listen
to the white ones.
All afternoon corny people sing about Colorado,
about everything being beautiful
about how we've only just begun.
My sister falls in love
with the singers but I sneak off
to Maria's house where
safe inside her room with the pink shag carpet
and bunk beds,
we can comb our dolls' hair and sing along when
the Ohio Players say,
He's the funkiest
Worm in the world.
We can dance
the Funky Chicken, tell imaginary intruders
to get the funk out
of our faces. Say the word so hard and so loud
and so many times,
it becomes something different to us-something
so silly
we laugh just thinking about it
Funky, funky,funky,
we sing again and again until the word is just a sound
not connected to anything
good or bad
right or wrong.