“Bebop/Hiphop” by Michael Jones

There was the black experience of it and the white experience of it, which, plotted as a scatter graph, would show two large dense clusters poles apart, trailing in their divergence thinning remnants of themselves that degenerated into blips around the midpoint, like a needlepoint glyph of cell division.

All kinds of cells –terrorist, prison, melodic, monastic—pointed their generations towards hipness, calling hear and here with midriffs bared mid-riff, experiencing poles and blips of the divergent selves they trailed around. Plots of skin thinned and thickened.

[author_info]Michael Jones teaches at Oakland High School in Oakland, CA. His poems appear in A Cappella Zoo, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His students call him Mike Jones and often prompt him with the query, “Who?” [/author]