JERRY #7

Sarah Blake

I No Longer Have to Look Up Dates Like Your Birthday, June 8, 1977

You held your 30th birthday party at a Louis Vuitton store. Fitting
for Kon the Louis Vuitton Don, a name
that follows your 2000 mixtape, your first.

People magazine waited outside your party, as I imagine
they always do. And you told them,
I’m in my 20s as we speak right now, but at midnight, I’ll be 30. I’m already 30 in Japan and London and everywhere else.

Inside, Pharrell of The Neptunes and N.E.R.D., an overweight Mariah Carey,
Common, of course, and Rihanna in a wig.
And a cake, at least three feet long, with your signature bear on it,
his wild-colored eyes.

Another cake too, with your name spelled wrong, Kayne. Who doesn't know you?

After the party, 30,000 dollars of merchandise was missing. So says Hip Hop Crunch. More people who want to write about you. The hundreds
of reviewers on Amazon, the commenters on YouTube, the bloggers, the magazines,
the poet.

And now you're 35.

Hate Is For Hitler

my mother used to tell me.
So I said and say, I don’t like... really don’t like... can’t stand...
My grandmother used to say it.

I wonder if Kanye's mother said it too.
Unconditional love
is what she speaks most about in her memoir.

I wonder if raised in a good family in Alabama
she picked up the same saying
my grandmother did

when she lived with her mother as one
of the oldest of six sisters and five brothers
in Philadelphia after the Depression.

All of my grandmother's friends went off to World War II.
She went to the dances for the servicemen, held them,
then followed the lists that were posted, lists of dead men.

How can these kids say they hate Kanye?
Why do they hate? Why is the word
in their mouths and out their fingers?

I think Kanye's like me,
and I think it's incomprehensible.
I think he and I and my mother and Donda West

are easily moved.
We enter into discourse thinking first,
love.