Letters to Mike Tyson

Letter Number 10 (Voice) 

Dear Mr. Tyson, 

Have you ever slept through a morning and woken up mid-afternoon unable to recognize your own voice? I mean really disconnected from the good head you thought you had on your shoulders. Freaked out. Fumbled any words that get close to the way things are or the man you want to be.  

I hardly remember yesterday from a soap opera episode or front-page story in a college-town newspaper. I’ve gotten so good at folktaleing, I can barely tell the difference between myself and  a comic book character. Written into being two-dimensional. Flat. Boxed in. Every last detail accounted for in thought bubbles and whatever ink was cheapest.  

I mean have you ever forgotten yourself completely? Remembered yourself several years later on a nothing afternoon. Nothing pointed or particularly special or vibrant. Vague hereness again, no argument necessary. Hereness, and with a voice you can’t pick out of a lineup to call your own.  

And I’ve had no other choice but to keep speaking in it. Writing in it like a secondhand subconscious, passed down from someone else who’d grown weary, worse for wear.  

I mean have you ever woken up long past a respectable hour and really hated your goddamned self? Like, “How in the hell could I possibly still be here to wake up to?” Thought it was all over lifetimes before the bell, false-started and disqualified. Thought we were waiting to appeal the ruling against us by a higher governing body. Thought we weren’t supposed to show our faces ever again in the upstairs gymnasiums putrid with sweet Cuban smoke. Brimmed hats. Further folktales rooted in not taking any shit.  

I fell asleep to old Malcolm X speeches and tried to dream the feeling it must have felt to be him as the producer of heroic voice. To be voice poured out like concrete. Solidity amidst trampling. And I thought about what it would be like far away from any smooth self-assurance, Allah’s hype, gifted to the point of modest luxury. And I thought about you, reminiscing over old outrages, rewording obscenities until they sound less like the plague they were and more delayed blessing. Make it all sound right again. From a memory that could’ve been a picture book or pigeon wing.  

What do you do when it might not sound right again no matter what, though?  

Sincerely, 

Evan Nave

~

Letter Number 12 (Towel) 

Dear Mr. Tyson, 

I don’t feel like fighting anymore, and there’s not enough revolutionary Black literature to change my mind. All I think about is it all and it all being over. Pain like a hand towel. Something embarrassing beneath the surface of skin. The amount of time spent consecutively without seeing someone related. (I keep my loved ones folded neatly between nearly-new covers  of books). The beautiful brutality put up with, and me shushed behind Amiri Baraka’s know-it all beard and the silent belief in writing well enough to meet him alive again. Not only Baraka, but James Baldwin holding the blood and water answers I’ve been praying for pointlessly since misreading the last chapter of Go Tell it on the Mountain. Zora Neal Hurston off to the side applying makeup and a crooked hat, criticizing us all for our self-righteousness.  

Like if I die honestly enough, they’ll be there to play with me on sacred paper. Like they’ve got nothing better to do with their rest. I tell perfect strangers how I don’t believe the world owes me shit, but my provocative death-fantasies say different. White flight through and through with  afterlife minstrels singing race music lyrics I know by heart. When I almost believe for certain there’s no White Jesus hard road to salvation. Aimé Césaire’s tender body instead, lying like a dignified martyr in a ditch. Fingers interlaced with Sonia Sanchez lines until I can barely tell the  difference, high off throbbing morphine, delusions of Black grandeur ushering me into the bustling backroom of some dusty Harlem library.  

I mean, almost every well-mannered member of the vox populi thinks you really are the evil behind your disheveled fists. And who could blame them with how intimately you whisper to violence and scrap metal? Rust under your eyes, between your overworked bones. But what about brutalities in big words? High-minded rhyme ideas. Enough intoxicated racisms to really believe I’ve got it bad enough to flaunt it. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t learn at least part of  it all from you, where your unconscious eyes were looking off to when Lennox Lewis tipped you onto your back that night in Memphis, 2002. I want to go to sleep and dream of something other than manifest destinies for a change. I want to forget how to conquer. 

Sincerely, 

Evan Nave

~

Letter Number 17 (Nickname) 

Dear Mr. Tyson, 

I’ve been lugging around this pay-to-play title for almost a year now, and I still don’t know how to pronounce my new nickname. Get the professional prefix out of my mouth. Push it carefully through my crooked front teeth.  

Things aren’t going very well. For example, last night I tried to listen to Gil Scott-Heron prophesy on wax but couldn’t get over how far away he sounded through knock-off headphones. Like, if I’m not willing to lay down serious dough for the real name-brand thing (endorsed by jacked professional athletes and the stretch marks on West Coast gangsta rap’s biceps), why am I wasting both of our time? Heron preaches from the liner notes, though, about Gerard Manley Hopkins chiseling his faith into a renovated granite kitchen countertop, hoping God will notice and at least partially subsidize the crumbling housing market with manna.  

Poems like carving knives to a bar of Lever 2000 bath soap. I bet you’d shape it into a stool pigeon and bite down on your bottom lip all day trying not to taste how it would taste to wring its neck. I’d be worried about overdrying too much to even touch the beak and feathers. Hands already behind bifocal lenses and the snowbird lifestyle. (Each winter I am nowhere to be found, perennially.) Embarrassed already by the wordplay at my christening and clean circumcision scar.  

What did you do with your pound-for-pound self on off days when there was nothing to destroy as proof? How were you able to pay steep utility bills, shop for Hanes tube socks, get out of bed before the rain takes hold, anything other than flex over the fallen bodies foolish enough to step to you?  

I don’t believe in myself. Like, I’m not convinced there’s enough evidence. And when I see you, I see us as two angry, ignorant agnostics—almost identical in our doubts—stunned senseless at how we happened. Hurt over not being asked about it first. But here. With nicknames stretched out of Spandex, caught flatfooted, temporary as pain.  

What do you do when you can’t stand the long and short of it? Because I barely have any breath left for a signature, and I’m not even sure what I’m signing off on. 

Sincerely, 

Evan Nave