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Balboa, the Entertainer

By Amiri Baraka b. 1934 Amiri Baraka

It cannot come

except you make it

from materials

it is not

caught from. (The philosophers

of need, of which

I am lately

one,

will tell you. “The People,”

(and not think themselves

liable

to the same

trembling flesh). I say now, “The People,

as some lesson repeated, now,

the lights are off, to myself,

as a lover, or at the cold wind.

Let my poems be a graph

of me. (And they keep

to the line, where flesh

drops off. You will go

blank at the middle. A

dead man.

But

die soon, Love. If

what you have for

yourself, does not

stretch to your body's

end.

(Where, without

preface,

music trails, or your fingers

slip

from my arm

Amiri Baraka, “Balboa, the Entertainer” from Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961-1995 (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Amiri Baraka. Reprinted with the permission of Sll/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

Source: Poetry (April 1962).

Biography

Amiri Baraka was born LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Baraka has become most known for his strident social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that has made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond . . .

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