The Markings of Music: “Crown for the Wu-Tang Clan Name Generator” by David Brennan

— for MF DOOM

Full Metal Prometheus

Warscape authentic with flames & marching chorus
of grown men chanting the Mickey Mouse

theme song. A jelly donut for your liver. A pyle
of sweet dogshit for your liver, a pyle of Holy

Jesus. The Engineers who made you a human
monster, alien, bio-recombinant gun machine

in a tantrum, paintball automatic
full metal splatter, they soliloquize over the corpse

of what you are not meant to know, of what
you are not meant to give. Guts is enough

to get some, get some, is enough to animal-mother
a Virgin Mary lavatory metaphor. Misbeliever,

joker who burns himself in effigy,
wake now & bid the bird good day.

Gilded Ape

You wake & bid the bird good day,
crow come to brutalize your sheen,

glisten of a skinned
primate who shed Old World for No World.

All that gleams is not. All that
punctuates is not punctuation.

Machinery mangles forest, clear cuts
pubis, reduces the lived-in

to the area of your own form, endangered
citizen who must beg for a piece

of yourself. The gods & their gavels,
their signatures of relief. Believe

in the crow who owns nothing but trinkets,
stolen. Flake your gold. Eat it, shit it out.

Unemotional Bagman

Stolen gold grill sparks your tongue; you spit shit.
Paper bag mask & a borrowed sweatshirt:

killer in a bad B-movie, ironic film school project,
kill anyone who doesn’t recycle plastic

with a hammer. Sicko, what’s your passion,
climate change freak or you just enjoy live action?

Gold flakes in your hair: chaff off a hay bale.
Party in a farm field; gross sex triangle

dialogue. You steal a life, dispose
of it; fine soil when it decomposes. Now

what’s funny, you don’t know what’s funny,
what’s in good faith, what bribe is on the daily.

What’s in good faith when the bag’s made of paper.
Identity coup: unmasked by a bottle of water.

Hot Adjudicator

Identity coop: your mask of feathers wears thin.
The untraceable internet is made of pigeons

or of a candle that will not be snuffed. King
who hoists umbrella for a crown. Landlines,

typewriters, word processing on screens
with blocky green letters. You saunter in

in leather pants, slide a coin across the table,
demand a deconsecration. The body gets colder

between display cases. High decibel secularity,
palms pressed tight in prayer, in fealty,

stabbed clean through with the blade of a sword.
The birds in their cages, bearers of words

like a knife buried in the soft pit of the eye,
the decree of a sentence just past ripe.

Quick Buddhist

The decree of a sentence is soft
like reality is soft, like a panda is soft,

or a dumpling, or breath at the bottom
of a flight of stairs; like stone stops

only what wishes to be stopped; say
something unexpected, like “plate”

or “it is just”; say what appears as the scroll
reflects, paper-sharp; like a jelly roll

is softest where the bite
finds darkened heart; you have been taught

that softness is soft when it is otherwise
hardest to handle; when it refuses

to be shaped, contained, contaminated, to do
what you bid it, because it is you.

Mad Stylist

Because she is you, because you need to look
perfect, a pair of hair shears turns scalpel.

Blood line. Because you need to be someone
whose neck is not scarred, to hear

someone else’s words muttered in the mirror
of your basement vanity. The difficulty of stripping

a scalp from a skull. A glass of wine,
scented candle. You fit the flay over the plastic

mannequin head, transparent
as you wish you were, gone,

a shell shot-up with light. Full metal. Burnt match,
reflective glass. You try on someone else’s talk. You slip

into her hair. You wish you were better at this.
You wish your head were shapeless.

Cheerful Ninja

The shape of your head is shapeless;
nowhere to place the mask that made you faceless,

that made you aces. Imposter syndrome:
your face any face, just cosplay fandom.

Your face any face: is that you at the concert,
or’d you hire some bloke to do your dirty work.

Like an obituary for the never dead,
write you a song from the crumbs of unleavened bread,

write you a battle you can’t step away from,
like Yip Man perplexed with a Playstation

controller, a back-alley scrape exploded
into full-scale war — level-meter reverb,

you move in divergent frequency, minus faces,
a doomscape scrubbed of flaming choruses.

***

Author’s Note: The title of each sonnet was found by running a different iteration of the poet’s name through the Wu-Tang Clan name generator. These poems spawned from my course at JMU on the intersection of rap and poetry. While discussing the late rapper MF DOOM’s work in relation to persona and the persona poem, I will often have my students do a similar exercise in which they use the Wu-Tang Clan name generator to discover their Wu-Tang name. They then compose a short verse from the point of view of their Wu-Tang persona. This is my somewhat skewed attempt at that exercise. I have always loved MF DOOM, particularly how he pushed persona to its performative limit — in his eyes MF DOOM was not a singular person, but a construct of language that anyone could wear, like the mask that he always donned. This crown was written in homage to the supervillain shortly after I learned of his passing.

David Brennan’s recent books include A Cyborg’s Father: Misreading Donna Haraway (punctum books, 2024), Disintegration F_ace (Schism Press), and A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit, winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Chapbook Contest. He lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University.