American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin ["I lock you in..."]

“I Lock You …” is part of a sonnet cycle, where each sonnet is titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” The first line of each individual poem acts as the subtitle. Though all the sonnets share the common theme of what it means to be Black in contemporary America, the poems also function as standalone works. In “I Lock You …” the “you” in question possibly refers to the titular “past and future assassin.” However, the identity of this assassin is complex and ever-shifting. Even though the speaker in “I Lock You …” wastes no time coming to business with this “you,” telling them directly and urgently that “I lock you in an American sonnet,” the “you” itself remains slippery and elusive. Why does this “you” want to kill the speaker, not just in the past but in the future as well? The reader is given a series of complex and odd metaphors to unravel the identity of the “you”. The relationship between the speaker and the assassin is the subject of the poem and encompasses personal and political realities. Assuming the “you” is the assassin, the poem forces this assassin to consider the reality of the speaker, the intended victim. By forcing the assassin to consider this reality, the speaker undoes traditional power structures.

One of the most striking features of the poem’s use of metaphors is that the comparisons are strange and disparate. The oddness of the metaphors highlights the difficulty of defining the relationship between the speaker and the “you”. Because this relationship is so complex, it cannot be expressed through logical metaphors. In the first line itself, the speaker compares the sonnet they are writing to a prison and a panic room, both images at odds with each other. A prison is associated with imprisonment and loss of safety, while a panic room with temporary escape and relief. The second line further complicates the juxtaposition between panic room and prison; they are both located in a burning house. Thus, even though the speaker locks the “you” in to keep them safe, they are doomed anyway. The three images are dissonant, but their very dissonance deepens the sense of claustrophobia and panic the poem seems to be heading towards. It is also not clear why the speaker would willingly lock the “you” or their alter ego in a sonnet which is a doomed place. Why can’t the speaker “lock” the “you” in a different place? This suggests the speaker is bound by their vocation as a poet and their education in the western tradition to “lock” the “you” in this particular poetic form, they have no other choice. Further, the use of “lock” in the sense of express implies that any attempt to express or define the truth means limiting it in some way, since nothing can capture the full truth. The “you” also refers to the reader. By locking the reader in the experience of reading the sonnet, the speaker is urging them to consider their role in manufacturing the speaker’s reality. The reader can no longer look away from their responsibility in the deep-seated racial injustice that is a feature of American society.

The odd metaphors continue in the next two lines with the speaker now comparing the sonnet form to “part music box, part meat / Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone” (Lines 3-4). An old-fashioned wind-up music box and a meat grinder are both hand-operated with a winding motion, but the purpose they serve is very different. A music box produces music, while a meat grinder shreds meat. A bird cannot emerge live from the meat grinder, neither does the grinder technically separate flesh from bone. The irreconcilable images show that creating a sonnet from the speaker’s experience is nearly impossible; the music or poetry produced will never be whole or satisfactory in the speaker’s estimation. Why does the speaker feel this way? The next series of images shed light on this question.

The next seven lines use a series of metaphors that evoke the quintessential American imagery of a school or college gym or ground, where a crowd watches an event from the bleachers. The excitement, performance, voyeurism, judgment, and competition associated with such an event is expertly recreated in these lines. The speaker locks the “you” into the persona of an athlete, alluding to the image of the athletic Black American. The speaker satirizes this cliché of popular culture, and also references the reality that historically America lionizes Black athletes while practicing racism. The speaker also alludes to the unhealthy focus on the performing Black body that is ubiquitous through American popular culture. (For instance, news coverage of Black tennis players Serena and Venus Williams has been criticized for focusing inordinately on the muscularity of their physique.)

While the persona performs, the better selves gawk at them. The better selves could refer to the white mainstream surveillance of Black people. The context of the speaker’s images becomes more explicit in Line 7, when they say they make the persona into both a “gym” and a “crow,” a reference to Jim Crow laws. The speaker continues the theme of the previous lines by playing on Jim and “gym”. The gym now represents world of mainstream America. The word bleachers, with “bleach” evoking whiteness is cleverly used, while the crow, dark-feathered, becomes a symbol for the Black American. Through these simple, odd and stark images, juxtaposing a gym with a crow, the speaker unpacks an entire history of violence against the Black body. The crow becomes beautiful, despite the torture it has undergone, referring to the violence against Black Americans, in the shadows of the gym. The speaker alludes to the flawed narrative that violence is essential to catharsis and rebirth. More often this is problematic, since it can be used to justify the violence against minorities. Yet, even though the gym – or mainstream white America - likes the performance of Black athletes and the speaker themselves who is after all performing the sonnet for America – they still don’t want to accept the reality and experience of Black Americans. This reality is like crow shit dropping down the walls of the gym, soiling its clean whites. Now the beautiful image of the blossoming crow is suddenly sunk into mundanity and ugliness, with pep rally stars drooping down the walls of the gym. The game is over, the stands are empty, and the American dream can never come true for some people.

As reality strikes the speaker, the speaker seeks refuge in art. This answers the question why the speaker must lock the self in a sonnet. They are forced to choose the sonnet because they admire its beauty and are educated in the western literary tradition. The speaker is a westerner and an American, so the sonnet is a natural choice. Yet mainstream society does not allow them to inhabit this form fully. The speaker returns to the bird and music box metaphor. The panic room and the prison cell too are invoked with the sonnet described as “a box of darkness with a bird in its heart” (Line 12). The circularity of the images shows that the speaker is no closer to an answer than when they began writing the sonnet. Certain questions cannot be answered yet. Thus the poem ends on a puzzling set of contradictory statements “ … It is not enough/ To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.” (Lines 13-14). Loving the “you” will not heal it or make its reality easy, neither will hating the “you” help. The answer thus lies in neither love or hate but probably in acceptance. In the very last line, the speaker expands the meaning of the “you” to include the other, which in this case is white America. Wanting to nullify white America or the history of violence against Black people cannot help heal the past or the future. The only way forward is acknowledging the different selves which make up the speaker – and the reader’s – identity.