Tavarus Blackmon

Issue No. 21 • Spring 2020

The Orange Shuffle

There is a call in the night a wolf— a coyote.
In the dark of this city where over-policing
And heroine needles encroach my front step,
I sit naked on a commode surrounded by seductive

        Black Widows.
Where are my plans for the Robert Arneson homage, 
My plans to visit the Gorilla Girls exhibition with my daughters?
I sit like The Thinker, a

Black Rodin
In the din of a tarnished sub-city; 
An enclave of trailers, trash empty - abandoned - single-shot
Vodka bottles and coteries of Muslim children
Clinging to mother where the citizen-devotees 
Pray to refuse piles. Where is my hard-line,

The stone within the currents’ pull?
I am lost, 
outside where the 
Call of  night
Leaves me hanging
On the sound   of a siren.

Come to chaperone my exhaustion to a place.
A place where gentlemen in jumpers eat slop and hoard warm milk,

Guffaw, chortle and gesticulate invisible
Demarcated lines of territory.

And pace where the caged occupy timelessness.
A place with hieroglyphics,

The timid walk backwards
And a malevolent sub-culture of control is built and enforced 
By the C.O. and his willing
Charge.


Time is easy, weight is heavy

There is a lot of discussion about the 
Persecution of others; Jail/bid/time.

How, the cis-male fears rape.
Rape in a world of rape:
Raped liberties;
Raped execution of justice;
Women raped like objects of cis-control. Irony withstanding.

But what about, how, the boy persecutes himself?
How, the upright atheist learns to fear God, Fear his country,
And profile the shadows walking counter-clockwise.

How he writes the manifesto,
Articulates a sharp corner And,
Puts himself squarely on the inside of an enclosing form.

It is not the persecution of others he fears,
The Black boy knows about time… yourself in the position of other
people’s endless, money-like clock.

It is how he learns to fear himself— What being, American-now, has made of him:
Felon.

He puts his dark dream in the shadow
And refuses to wake
When his lover says, stay.


Jail/Die/Millions

Mom wipes her sweat
Presses her suits every Sunday
Like church, but only with money, where’s God?

In the darkness she cuts light,
Endeavors to establish an infant
Ideology.

You are not America, she says,
But it would like [you];
In the cell, she tells me.

In a shallow grave;
It would like to string you up
Like a Turkey or carp.

“It,” is how I learn to name
My country, something too
Damn vile for John or Mister,

…Has captured me like a magazine-woman,
A piece of tearing-meat. On the stage
Where theatre is entertainment

And, they pay to laugh like mouths 
Without lips - that do not close -
Or crook, a grin if not of possession.

Or, I could get rich, she laughs.
My body a resource of exotic
Pleasure in the gray-starch, bed.

Tavarus Blackmon, also known as Blackmonster, is resisting patriarchy with his partner and three children in the City of Trees, Sacramento, California. He earned his MFA as Provost Fellow at the University of California Davis. He has been under Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Kala Art Institute. His practice is interdisciplinary and intermedium.

His work has appeared in Susurrus, Calaveras Station, The Suisun Valley Review, Sacramento City Exchange, Instagram and he has contributed to The Sacramento News and Review, Arts and Culture. He has exhibited in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Mexico City and Berlin. He has curated panel discussions, presentations and exhibitions at Beatnik Gallery, The Golden One Center’s digital media displays, Axis Gallery and the Master of Art in Studio Art Thesis Exhibition at the CSU, Sacramento Library and Library Annex Gallery. He is an artist member at Axis Gallery, Sacramento, where he assists in the production of cultural exchange through Fine Art with the Northern California community.

He has developed and published work for the web including the sites Tavarus Blackmon Art, Awedio Codex and Black Monster Night Light. His site, BlackmonsteReview hosts his thesis, The Politics of the Cartoon and Contemporary Art. Additional and substantive video and audio can be found under the profiles Tavarus Blackmon and Black Audio Monster on Vimeo and Soundcloud, respectively.