An Agony. As Now.

The title of the poem suggests both the immediacy of the pain and the pain of the present. The fragmented punctuation foreshadows the speaker’s fractured identity.

The poem’s simple language makes the speaker’s emotions more accessible, while the abstraction makes the poem’s meaning more difficult to understand. Baraka’s poems often place a heavy emphasis on emotion in the hopes of spurring radical political change. Here, the poem’s anger might drive the reader to reflect on oppression and their own potential racial biases.

The poem’s opening line uses simple words to describe the conceit of the poem: the speaker is trapped “inside someone / who hates” him (Lines 1-2). This line establishes the terror and anger that will be described in the poem. The use of the first-person pronoun “I” (Line 1) at first suggests a literal meaning, that the speaker is physically trapped, yet the rest of the stanza reveals how this poem actually focuses on the psychological experience of the soul. The speaker uses physical sensations of seeing, smelling, and loving to describe the psychological experience. The speaker can look, but only “out from his eyes” (Line 3). The speaker can smell, but he smells “fouled tunes” (Line 4) from the body’s mouth.