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"The King Is Dead, Long Live the King" by Julian Randall

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? September 3, 2018 Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged I know I know the kingdom is

[View this email on a browser]( [Forward to a friend]( [facebook-icon]( [tumblr-icon]( [twitter-icon]( September 3, 2018 [The King Is Dead, Long Live the King]( [Julian Randall]( Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged I know I know the kingdom is not fair but it’s what I have a montage of red and a mitosis of knuckles I’m not sure how you could expect me to love anything Ain’t no question sadness is regal like that golden and replaceable once I wanted a lineage of identical men once a mouth soft and hot as the quickest way that gold can hurt you You see a pattern yet? I practice the want of nothing and fail I’ve been shown how ugly I can be when I am invisible I don’t believe in yesterdays The throat of loneliness? Straddled with my knife I press my hands to my face and the lament is a valley the light sags through What do you do when you have lost Everything? Rewrite the history of Everything I don’t like my smile because someone told me I didn’t like it Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered Flex the antonym of Missing I avenge myself Stretch my hands I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty ain’t no question I monarch the lonely I my own everything now I miss my love and it is an American grief I strike the smell from nostalgia cut my memory to spite my country What is the odor of nothing but my dominion in want of excess I grin and pillars of bone flower into sawed-off crowns say I flex the light and the light flexes heat shimmer unfurling like a bicep my lust a mirage where the body is merely a congealing of the river I can feel it slowly drifting away from me The world I knew is gone and getting more gone and my anthem populating my nose with an abundance of salt I slip the shroud over the life I named and forget I belonged to someone once My sovereign’s face is a riot of diamonds whining This will be a beautiful death and I am free and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again I rock the jeweled shroud become the bride of my own sad light [Like this on Facebook]( [Share via Twitter]( Copyright © 2018 Julian Randall. Used with permission of the author. [Julian Randall reads "The King is Dead, Long Live the King"]( About This Poem “Kanye West was one of the people who first made me want to be a writer, and while I oppose nearly everything he is saying and doing these days, a first mirror is not abandoned so easily or completely. This began as an attempt to create a poem that flows at a rhythmic level in much the same way that the song ‘Gorgeous’ from his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy does. To reckon with Kanye’s influence on me is to interrogate what I grieve and why I grieve it. While Dark Fantasy isn’t my favorite Kanye album, I have always at some level adored the way Kanye binds elegy to excess; I find it beautiful in a way that has always inspired me to stand up straighter. The poem’s title sprung to my mind while I was looking at an alternate cover for Dark Fantasy, which depicted a decapitated Kanye wearing a crown with a sword piercing him from the side. It seemed to beg the question, if the sovereign is beheaded who inherits his grief?” —Julian Randall [Julian Randall]( Julian Randall is the author of Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), which won the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Randall is currently an MFA candidate at University of Mississippi and lives in Oxford, Mississippi. Poetry by Randall [Refuse]( (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) "a note on the body" by Danez Smith [read-more]( "The American middle class..." by Dawn Lundy Martin [read-more]( "Caution" by Kwame Dawes [read-more]( September Guest Editor: Rigoberto González Thanks to Rigoberto González, author of Unpeopled Eden (Four Way Books, 2013), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about [González]( and our [guest editors for the year.]( [make a one-time donation]( [make a monthly donation]( [Small-Blue-RGB-poets.org-Logo]( Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit [Poets.org](. You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click [here](. © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038 From Our Sponsors [Advertisement](

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