unsubtlety
what? yes. I looked up that word, and found nothing. huh? so I looked up antonyms to subtlety. (imagine me blinking.) the first one was ignorance. I definitely did not mean that. so I looked up subtlety and learned that it was being subtle. not much help. so I considered what subtlety means to me. a Jaguar is subtle. it doesn't exactly say, "What you think is a year's wages, this man thinks is pocket change." but it leans in that direction. especially when his serious car is an Aston-Martin. and maybe that sentence is another example of subtle. by contrast, a Harley is not subtle. a Harley is big. a Harley is mechanical. it shows off its mechanicalness. those of us who love them think they are beautiful. a Harley has awesome torque. a Harley doesn't cut through the wind, it doesn't sleek through the wind, it bulls through the wind, tall and proud. and the rider of a Harley sits low in the frame, so you can see a rider with fairly short legs sitting comfortably on a Harley. I could be mistaken, but I think there is nothing subtle about a Harley. that's the unsubtlety I appreciate. and I appreciate that kind of unsubtlety in a poem too. Wanda Coleman's raw rage, Lucille Clifton's defiant ode to her hips, Amiri Baraka's demand to be heard, to be listened to in a world built on white supremacy, Galway Kinnell's hunt for the bear, these, I say, are unsubtlety, and I praise.
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