Two wrongs don't make a right, but christians aren't perfect, they're just forgiven. Negroes don't even know that they live on the biggest continent on the earth, don't even know there are Negroes across the ocean. Chinese negroes, Japanese negroes, french negroes, english negroes, african negroes, brazilian negroes, mexican negroes, dutch negroes, negroes everywhere! Given the whole bloody world, it's been given to the negroes. Give them your mind! Give them your soul! Give them a piece.
Establish Slavery!
Abolish Slavery!
GIve them jobs or 40 acres of land and a mule!
Give them Jobs!
Give them lynch mobs, give them drugs!
Give them our daughters!
Give them our DNA!
Give them the white house!
Give them my job!
Give them my guilt!
I'm a negro now too I've learned, and it's interesting. Not all the way quite, but we're working on it. Me and my negro me. Me and my negro mind. The negro mind sees things differently my. 'x' saw it, she called it out, caught it before I did. Caught it sneaking in and shot it sexier looks than she shot me. My negro mind sees things differently and fills me in on them.
There's a moment, I realize now, when familiar things and places cease being a source of comfort. Through the lens of the other mind, the negro mind, they appear threatening and off limits or ambivalent and spitefully gay like something you know you'll never be able to own even if you've made enough to buy it 10 times over. The Other mind can SEE evil manifested in the common world of the everyday. Normally you can only see it's shadow, cool, distant.
I like Robert Motherwell. I'm black like that. Not like Langston, not like Dizzy, or Goldy, or Spike Lee. I'm black like dried paint, like a robert Motherwell, like a Spanish National anthem, like a fallen matador, like a 1975 Dodge Camero, like a friend in gallery, like spots on a cow. Like a shadow in a Kafka short story during broad daylight cast by a little girl who just wants to be a shadow, not the residue of something more tangible and threatening. Just free to come and go as it pleases, to blend in with darkness and be in harmony with light. I am black like that and I will make great art from that which I am.
I am black like Robert Ryman is white and projected onto a field of textured wall.
I am black like Robert Rauschenberg is white spilled all over a secret language of discarded objects that emerge like manhattan's lower east side when you descend upon it from a blanket of clouds.
I am black like Japser Johns is gray mottled on stenciled letters, and woodblocks.
I am black, not like Robert Motherwell is white, but like a Robert Motherwell is black.
I am not black like the Invisible Man is black, but I am invisible like the invisible man is unseen. I am invisible not like a ghost is dead, but like a ghost can see other dancing shadows and living spirits around him that pass unseen, cool, distant, and ignorable. I'm not dead. I'm alive, like a white man is alive, like a white man is alive, and like black man has a living body, and so I am gray. And I enjoy being gray in my mind, black in my body and invisible to the rest of the world like white light waves pass through water- the way black smothers white, and light casts away shadow. I exist as both world's, as a negation in a nether world.
Neither black and white, nor black, nor white, nor other, except for sometimes when I play and think now as Other. With no outward representation in society or mass media, there is no context into which we can be placed and standardized against. We're guilty by nature, both oppressed and oppressor, the perfect American formula. Criminal and Victim. We exist as illusions, reminders of a white multi-cultural dream still walking the earth like phantoms in places like the midwest. Our cultural dialogue was summarized at Jonestown. A brief impossible utopia suddenly and senselessly destroyed. So many of our would be mentors and friends perished there, torn from their mothers white and black and injected with red cyanide watching their rainbow colored playmates fall before them in blue shorts and red shirts vomiting and screaming as white men with long shaggy hair and sky blue shorts watched them twist and squirm in the dust like stranded earthworms. And so we live as refugees from Utopia, but we will never disappear altogether. Simply continue to fade in and out. To reappear and disappear like a song carried on a cool breeze, passing. Staying momentarily in our own private worlds. No population can claim us, we are an aborted race, a remnant of a lingering nightmare that was too real to be forgotten, as hard as they try. A perpetual reminder, bourn like a scarlet letter that redemption is possible, even if it is no longer coveted. In the mean time, for us, transcendence from earthly identification, suffering and desire is the only option. But I digress. As I was saying before...
Monday, March 21, 2011
Current Events
I don't listen to the news as much as I used to. I hear it. I know things are going on. A crazy man that looks like an old pale wallet wearing a tacky window dressing is slaughtering his own people like a prison warden putting down a riot. A little girl is missing not too far from where I sit. I bought two books recently, one looked like a copy of the bible with the golden silhouette of a naked woman on it, the other had a picture of Sartre and Camus. The absurdity of my own existence has become more presient to me as well. The past 20 months have been something else. I began living in a triangle between two states. I've begun drawing buildings and composing music out of triangles as well, I've learned about renaissance geometry, virtual architecture, and the virtues of cruelty in youth- against my better judgement. I've learned that we've been in a war for 10 years, but you wouldn't know it. There are cities being torn apart like bodies by cancer, but not here. At least not where you can see them.
Oh sure, the ghettos still fester, perhaps finally the 'negro problem' we've inherited will finally become simply a black scab from a festering wound that can be picked and flicked off with a friendly thumb nail. I wrote a story in protest about a young black man being raped by an old french man. It disturbs me to see hip male 20 somethings enjoying this kind of topic rather than leaving the room or shooting me dirty looks, but I guess I'm out numbered so what else do you do but keep reading?
That was a true story, about that young black man. So is this. I keep telling myself to write a journal. To keep a document so I don't forget all the crazy shit that's gone down, but Sartre would say 'keep having adventures, chronicles me damned!'. All the fun, all the despair, all the hard work, and blood, and tears, and loud noises. I've been through three cars, three places of residency. Everything seems to be about the number three. Three cities, three girls, three's company, Ad Triangulum.
I know there's a war going on, and I'm not in it.
I know the Marines will be back soon. My friend Mike came back to kill a man. A friend of mine, a friend of his, a friend of my father. There's that number three again. Another friend went back, because he didn't see enough action. Maybe he'll come back to kill someone too; another gay black professor, or a japanese feminist art historian. Maybe me, who knows. I don't know. I say that a lot too. I don't know. I'm not big on descriptions these days. My favorite method of writing is on my cellphone. I've written several poems, even started a novel on it. It's quite a machine, I won't get rid of it because it's got some of my finest work on it, but I'd due for an upgrade, so what do you do other than get a new cell phone?
I'm no longer in a depression as I used to be, but now we're all in a depression all the same. But you wouldn't know it from where I'm sitting. Where are all the soup lines? I'm happier than I've been in a long time, and I don't owe it to a career, or a woman, or fame or recognition. I owe it to bending my body into uncomfortable positions, and hacking dead tree branches off of a douglas fir with a hatchet. I'm getting bored of the sound of my own music, but I'm too lazy to make more. Not lazy.
I don't know.
I'm busy as ever. Busier. There's a war going on and people are dying. There are coup d'etat's spreading all over the middle east like dominoes against a man that looks like an old catcher's mit in a salmon colored window treatment. There's a war, and a famine, and a disaster. I scare people without trying simply because they look in my eyes- they give me authority, they call me sir without even noticing, but they won't give me a job. I guess I have to do that myself.
I rather enjoy my genteel poverty and my romantic friends. I could do with out Byron, but Percy and Mary Shelley would be good company.
There's a war going on still, and I'm not fighting the bad guys on either side, I'm just waiting for the veterans to come back and start raising hell like they should on a weekend. I ask myself where all the ass holes are at the bars. They're all over seas learning how to be bigger assholes, learning how to kill gay black college professors, or straight bi-racial college graduates who have noticed the lack of protest and sincerity in casual sex. I guess I should be thankful. That's been what I've been telling myself now for months.
I should be grateful for the war, grateful for fascism, grateful for something to wage a crusade against, grateful for being next in line to be bestowed the honor of marxist-revisionist-experimental composer and abstract painter who's tall, dark, handsome and frequently able to make people laugh. I like my glasses too, and the girls like my hair short, but there's a war going on and I'm not fighting it.
The hipsters are starting to disappear, being replaced by test tube babies in tight pants, not because they have hepatitis or took too many drugs, but because their fathers didn't make them play sports. They didn't make them do anything except take out the trash or fill out a college application because they THINK that's what a boy his age should be doing right about now. That's what I think America really is. Just the end result of everyone doing what they think they're supposed to do. It's not evil, though the army does evil things. It's simply the end result of a history of cast off foreigners all trying to be someone else, all trying to be something better, something more inherently moral, and it's okay if millions die for that private luxury. They were sacrificed, and sacrifice and murder are as different as sacrifice and suicide. Their lives were not taken in vain. It's a just a country full of people whose whole history has been defined by people doing what they think they're supposed to.
There's a war going on.
I heard a voice on the radio today. It was in English. A translator speaking over a voice in japanese. It said that the japanese are not the type to wage a coup d'etat. They'll just sit around quietly and wait to die.
My 1st ex-girlfriend of 2007 said to me in 2008, in the wake of a disastrous relationship with a predatory lesbian, that we lived in an age in which nothing was happening. I knew THAT was bullshit, and I couldn't believe that SHE of all people would say something so asinine and obtuse. But then again, she thought that Nietchze was 27 when he had that picture taken. You know the one I'm talking about. We were only weeks away from a having either a black or female president (there was no way the republicans were going to clean up the mess when a negro or a woman could do it instead). Weeks away from an global economic meltdown, devastating earthquakes in Chile and Haiti. Personal technology was spinning circles around us. 'Big Brother' had come out into the open and could chat with u online. Nothing is happening? At least acknowledge the fact that we haven't spoken to each other in almost a year, that your coveted triste with an older woman has fallen apart only months behind you, the wreckage still visible in you living room and disheveled appearance. I didn't say anything about the war, or Obama or Hillary, or secret prisons, or a communist president, or a fascist corporate state, or even a fricking iPhone, I just agreed with her politely hoping that if I made a pass she wouldn't tear my lungs out. No coup d'etat on the balcony this afternoon, no exercise of superior physical force or passion waged against my former oppressor right in front of me. I guess I'll just listen to my roomate's ipod on the bus and avoid conjouring memories that never took place to pass the time, ho hum. I did the polite thing and just sat on the other end of the deck and kept my hands to myself and it occured to me that she might never be happy again, at least as happy as she HAD been when I knew her best.
But I digress, there's still a war going on.
Now japan is on the verge of the worst nuclear disaster since 3 mile Island (nothing tops Chernobyl), the earthquake there has rocked the earths rotation slightly out of alignment. A couple more of these little global tectonic hiccups, and we very well could do a 180 from pole to pole by next year. Hurricane season, like the holidays, will be here before you know it. I'm waiting to hear that Amsterdam has been hit by a flood, that Naples as been bifurcated by a massive earthquake, that a coffeee shop in Seattle is buried in volcanic ash, that the galapagos island chain has begun hovering above the ocean, and that the 'illegal aliens' have crossed back over the border and returned to the Mayan temples with trucks full of big digital atomic clocks stolen from Children's museums. I'm waiting to see a stock broker in a teflon armani suit open fire on his daughter's montessori class with an AK-47 and finish the survivors with a tomahawk. I'm waiting to get laid again, I'm waiting for grandma to go to a nursing home, I'm waiting to lose 10 lbs, I'm waiting for my student loan deferments to run out, I'm waiting to get on a plane to Italy and show off some schematic diagrams of sonified architecture that I'm currently waiting to finish. I'm waiting to see a ghost in this house. Maybe I'm the ghost. Maybe I just sat politely and died in my sleep at some point last month and I can't remember. Maybe that's why I've learned to be Invisible.
Perhaps, now I'll stop seeing people as the realization becomes less of a dream and more of a reality. Maybe I am too nice. But I don't think so. I think I'm right on point. A little tardy, out right late most of the time, but always ahead of the curve, or at least able to see where it's turning. I don't know. I just like to say that to seem humble.
I DO know.
I DO know that everything will be okay,
I DO know that I'll get laid soon.
I DON'T know if I'll grow my dreads back out,
but I DO know, that it won't be long before I'm standing on an elevated platform before a crowd of people speaking again, living in the moment the only way I've figured out how to do it. It's a comfortable feeling, very familiar. It may be on a stage, it may be at a podium. I might have a loudspeaker, I might have a laser pointer. It may be in Perugia, or Assisi, Rome, Chicago, Mexico City, my own back yard. It might be because I'm Invisible. But, it'll happen. It's happened before, just like the tide that destroyed Sendai rolled back, only to come back stronger.
I identify with that wave, and Invisible strength of water. But end of the world or not, I'm gaining speed and heading toward land. To hell with the end of the world, I don't have time to wait for that. Besides, when all is said and done. I know it's going to be alright, I just don't know for how long.
Oh sure, the ghettos still fester, perhaps finally the 'negro problem' we've inherited will finally become simply a black scab from a festering wound that can be picked and flicked off with a friendly thumb nail. I wrote a story in protest about a young black man being raped by an old french man. It disturbs me to see hip male 20 somethings enjoying this kind of topic rather than leaving the room or shooting me dirty looks, but I guess I'm out numbered so what else do you do but keep reading?
That was a true story, about that young black man. So is this. I keep telling myself to write a journal. To keep a document so I don't forget all the crazy shit that's gone down, but Sartre would say 'keep having adventures, chronicles me damned!'. All the fun, all the despair, all the hard work, and blood, and tears, and loud noises. I've been through three cars, three places of residency. Everything seems to be about the number three. Three cities, three girls, three's company, Ad Triangulum.
I know there's a war going on, and I'm not in it.
I know the Marines will be back soon. My friend Mike came back to kill a man. A friend of mine, a friend of his, a friend of my father. There's that number three again. Another friend went back, because he didn't see enough action. Maybe he'll come back to kill someone too; another gay black professor, or a japanese feminist art historian. Maybe me, who knows. I don't know. I say that a lot too. I don't know. I'm not big on descriptions these days. My favorite method of writing is on my cellphone. I've written several poems, even started a novel on it. It's quite a machine, I won't get rid of it because it's got some of my finest work on it, but I'd due for an upgrade, so what do you do other than get a new cell phone?
I'm no longer in a depression as I used to be, but now we're all in a depression all the same. But you wouldn't know it from where I'm sitting. Where are all the soup lines? I'm happier than I've been in a long time, and I don't owe it to a career, or a woman, or fame or recognition. I owe it to bending my body into uncomfortable positions, and hacking dead tree branches off of a douglas fir with a hatchet. I'm getting bored of the sound of my own music, but I'm too lazy to make more. Not lazy.
I don't know.
I'm busy as ever. Busier. There's a war going on and people are dying. There are coup d'etat's spreading all over the middle east like dominoes against a man that looks like an old catcher's mit in a salmon colored window treatment. There's a war, and a famine, and a disaster. I scare people without trying simply because they look in my eyes- they give me authority, they call me sir without even noticing, but they won't give me a job. I guess I have to do that myself.
I rather enjoy my genteel poverty and my romantic friends. I could do with out Byron, but Percy and Mary Shelley would be good company.
There's a war going on still, and I'm not fighting the bad guys on either side, I'm just waiting for the veterans to come back and start raising hell like they should on a weekend. I ask myself where all the ass holes are at the bars. They're all over seas learning how to be bigger assholes, learning how to kill gay black college professors, or straight bi-racial college graduates who have noticed the lack of protest and sincerity in casual sex. I guess I should be thankful. That's been what I've been telling myself now for months.
I should be grateful for the war, grateful for fascism, grateful for something to wage a crusade against, grateful for being next in line to be bestowed the honor of marxist-revisionist-experimental composer and abstract painter who's tall, dark, handsome and frequently able to make people laugh. I like my glasses too, and the girls like my hair short, but there's a war going on and I'm not fighting it.
The hipsters are starting to disappear, being replaced by test tube babies in tight pants, not because they have hepatitis or took too many drugs, but because their fathers didn't make them play sports. They didn't make them do anything except take out the trash or fill out a college application because they THINK that's what a boy his age should be doing right about now. That's what I think America really is. Just the end result of everyone doing what they think they're supposed to do. It's not evil, though the army does evil things. It's simply the end result of a history of cast off foreigners all trying to be someone else, all trying to be something better, something more inherently moral, and it's okay if millions die for that private luxury. They were sacrificed, and sacrifice and murder are as different as sacrifice and suicide. Their lives were not taken in vain. It's a just a country full of people whose whole history has been defined by people doing what they think they're supposed to.
There's a war going on.
I heard a voice on the radio today. It was in English. A translator speaking over a voice in japanese. It said that the japanese are not the type to wage a coup d'etat. They'll just sit around quietly and wait to die.
My 1st ex-girlfriend of 2007 said to me in 2008, in the wake of a disastrous relationship with a predatory lesbian, that we lived in an age in which nothing was happening. I knew THAT was bullshit, and I couldn't believe that SHE of all people would say something so asinine and obtuse. But then again, she thought that Nietchze was 27 when he had that picture taken. You know the one I'm talking about. We were only weeks away from a having either a black or female president (there was no way the republicans were going to clean up the mess when a negro or a woman could do it instead). Weeks away from an global economic meltdown, devastating earthquakes in Chile and Haiti. Personal technology was spinning circles around us. 'Big Brother' had come out into the open and could chat with u online. Nothing is happening? At least acknowledge the fact that we haven't spoken to each other in almost a year, that your coveted triste with an older woman has fallen apart only months behind you, the wreckage still visible in you living room and disheveled appearance. I didn't say anything about the war, or Obama or Hillary, or secret prisons, or a communist president, or a fascist corporate state, or even a fricking iPhone, I just agreed with her politely hoping that if I made a pass she wouldn't tear my lungs out. No coup d'etat on the balcony this afternoon, no exercise of superior physical force or passion waged against my former oppressor right in front of me. I guess I'll just listen to my roomate's ipod on the bus and avoid conjouring memories that never took place to pass the time, ho hum. I did the polite thing and just sat on the other end of the deck and kept my hands to myself and it occured to me that she might never be happy again, at least as happy as she HAD been when I knew her best.
But I digress, there's still a war going on.
Now japan is on the verge of the worst nuclear disaster since 3 mile Island (nothing tops Chernobyl), the earthquake there has rocked the earths rotation slightly out of alignment. A couple more of these little global tectonic hiccups, and we very well could do a 180 from pole to pole by next year. Hurricane season, like the holidays, will be here before you know it. I'm waiting to hear that Amsterdam has been hit by a flood, that Naples as been bifurcated by a massive earthquake, that a coffeee shop in Seattle is buried in volcanic ash, that the galapagos island chain has begun hovering above the ocean, and that the 'illegal aliens' have crossed back over the border and returned to the Mayan temples with trucks full of big digital atomic clocks stolen from Children's museums. I'm waiting to see a stock broker in a teflon armani suit open fire on his daughter's montessori class with an AK-47 and finish the survivors with a tomahawk. I'm waiting to get laid again, I'm waiting for grandma to go to a nursing home, I'm waiting to lose 10 lbs, I'm waiting for my student loan deferments to run out, I'm waiting to get on a plane to Italy and show off some schematic diagrams of sonified architecture that I'm currently waiting to finish. I'm waiting to see a ghost in this house. Maybe I'm the ghost. Maybe I just sat politely and died in my sleep at some point last month and I can't remember. Maybe that's why I've learned to be Invisible.
Perhaps, now I'll stop seeing people as the realization becomes less of a dream and more of a reality. Maybe I am too nice. But I don't think so. I think I'm right on point. A little tardy, out right late most of the time, but always ahead of the curve, or at least able to see where it's turning. I don't know. I just like to say that to seem humble.
I DO know.
I DO know that everything will be okay,
I DO know that I'll get laid soon.
I DON'T know if I'll grow my dreads back out,
but I DO know, that it won't be long before I'm standing on an elevated platform before a crowd of people speaking again, living in the moment the only way I've figured out how to do it. It's a comfortable feeling, very familiar. It may be on a stage, it may be at a podium. I might have a loudspeaker, I might have a laser pointer. It may be in Perugia, or Assisi, Rome, Chicago, Mexico City, my own back yard. It might be because I'm Invisible. But, it'll happen. It's happened before, just like the tide that destroyed Sendai rolled back, only to come back stronger.
I identify with that wave, and Invisible strength of water. But end of the world or not, I'm gaining speed and heading toward land. To hell with the end of the world, I don't have time to wait for that. Besides, when all is said and done. I know it's going to be alright, I just don't know for how long.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Uncertain Terrain
Where do we meet you and I?
We've come from the same world,
lands apart.
Separated by causeways,
rivers, hills, and used
car dealerships.
Tethered together by vines
of Kudzoo. A plant so
ubiquitous and so foreign
to the land we admit to share,
but so seldom dare
to embrace
in the eyes of our
Northern cousins.
Where is The South
in the world?
On the globe it's
north of the equator.
mild, Serene,
sweet, sour,
soft, hardly perfect.
It's just right
in the middle.
But the twang
is the sound of
Motion-sick mountain drives
and stern silent glares
if you don't mind
your manners.
It doesn't matter that
we stopped using the
N-word.
That George Wallace
Repented.
That grand-paw cried with
company in the living room
because it's too
hard to change.
We have skyscrapers,
malls, museums.
We have everything we need
for geeks, gooks, krauts,
japs, frogs, towel-heads,
and Afro-Americans.
We can feed and clothe and
house our own and
our visitors too.
There hasn't been a lynch
mob in ages, and mama
loves her new black
baby!
So what does it take to
Love OUR home?
The land of color?
Corn flower blue,
Big Orange,
the Crimson Tide,
where folks like things
Chicken Fried?
The land of Blue Grass,
Golden-rod and indigo.
Yellow bellies,
red clay,
red necks,
blacks, whites
and browns?
Where August is as long
as the drawl and about
twice as thick in
The Smokies,
the French Broad,
and on the Delta.
Where hearts are open,
and minds are too.
Where mouths take pride
in what hands can do.
What does it take to Love
this land?
This people called 'trash'.
Why is it okay only to
hate her?
The big and broad,
skinny and long,
missing toothed,
big footed
bare back blue eyed blonde?
With her frail features,
warm heart, and pale hands,
she consumes the shame and agency
of all who wash up on
her newly swept door step.
She answers the door
in a night shirt after
it's far too late for visitors.
And we come inside,
and try to claim her.
To wash the indelible stains
out of her linens. We
try to claim her first in our
hearts when we are alone
staring at a ceiling fan on a
hot night with no AC,
plagued by mosquitoes
and a mysterious itch.
We want to claim her first
before Scottish, Irish, German,
Anglo, or Cherokee Indian.
Are we too just as foreign
to this land and just as despicable
as this vine that binds us to her?
It's a hard thing to acknowledge
that this place now is what is,
and is all that it is.
It will never change, it will
never go quietly from our hearts
and leave us in peace in this
'better' place in which we have
found each other,
to be neighbors yet again.
Yet here we are, voluntary refugees
from home in a better place
with culture.
Where you don't have to say grace
before dinner,
or go to Church on Sunday.
But for all this, we still
share the mark of our lesser race
in the freckles and moles that
are upon our face.
We come from a shamed,
Un-visible place.
And we will never call it by its name…
not even once.
We've come from the same world,
lands apart.
Separated by causeways,
rivers, hills, and used
car dealerships.
Tethered together by vines
of Kudzoo. A plant so
ubiquitous and so foreign
to the land we admit to share,
but so seldom dare
to embrace
in the eyes of our
Northern cousins.
Where is The South
in the world?
On the globe it's
north of the equator.
mild, Serene,
sweet, sour,
soft, hardly perfect.
It's just right
in the middle.
But the twang
is the sound of
Motion-sick mountain drives
and stern silent glares
if you don't mind
your manners.
It doesn't matter that
we stopped using the
N-word.
That George Wallace
Repented.
That grand-paw cried with
company in the living room
because it's too
hard to change.
We have skyscrapers,
malls, museums.
We have everything we need
for geeks, gooks, krauts,
japs, frogs, towel-heads,
and Afro-Americans.
We can feed and clothe and
house our own and
our visitors too.
There hasn't been a lynch
mob in ages, and mama
loves her new black
baby!
So what does it take to
Love OUR home?
The land of color?
Corn flower blue,
Big Orange,
the Crimson Tide,
where folks like things
Chicken Fried?
The land of Blue Grass,
Golden-rod and indigo.
Yellow bellies,
red clay,
red necks,
blacks, whites
and browns?
Where August is as long
as the drawl and about
twice as thick in
The Smokies,
the French Broad,
and on the Delta.
Where hearts are open,
and minds are too.
Where mouths take pride
in what hands can do.
What does it take to Love
this land?
This people called 'trash'.
Why is it okay only to
hate her?
The big and broad,
skinny and long,
missing toothed,
big footed
bare back blue eyed blonde?
With her frail features,
warm heart, and pale hands,
she consumes the shame and agency
of all who wash up on
her newly swept door step.
She answers the door
in a night shirt after
it's far too late for visitors.
And we come inside,
and try to claim her.
To wash the indelible stains
out of her linens. We
try to claim her first in our
hearts when we are alone
staring at a ceiling fan on a
hot night with no AC,
plagued by mosquitoes
and a mysterious itch.
We want to claim her first
before Scottish, Irish, German,
Anglo, or Cherokee Indian.
Are we too just as foreign
to this land and just as despicable
as this vine that binds us to her?
It's a hard thing to acknowledge
that this place now is what is,
and is all that it is.
It will never change, it will
never go quietly from our hearts
and leave us in peace in this
'better' place in which we have
found each other,
to be neighbors yet again.
Yet here we are, voluntary refugees
from home in a better place
with culture.
Where you don't have to say grace
before dinner,
or go to Church on Sunday.
But for all this, we still
share the mark of our lesser race
in the freckles and moles that
are upon our face.
We come from a shamed,
Un-visible place.
And we will never call it by its name…
not even once.
Friday, December 3, 2010
The Embrace
I listened to the radio this morning. There was a live BBC broadcast from the mine in Chile where those poor men had been trapped for several weeks. It struck me the first time I heard it. I imagined what may have been going through their heads when they were trapped in the mine. They had no idea they would ever escape. They thought they would be trapped. They thought, they would die. The really thought it was the end, that no one would come and try to rescue them. Trapped like bugs in a jar, waiting to gasp their last breath. The rescue was always underway however. That matters. They were going to be rescued. Scientists know how long the human body can live without oxygen. They drank from the stalagtites. The water that dripped down. Economized their breath. Never screamed. Slept a lot. In the pitch black. Before they were brought to the surface, the rescuers dropped down some elvis tapes I guess, since one of the men liked Elvis. They dropped blindfolds as well. they knew the light of the sun would be too intense. The broadcasters talked about how great it would be for them to breathe fresh air for the first time. But I think they should have given them respirators as well as blindfolds. Filled with compressed stagnant smelly air. Such a shock, that mountain air would have been, and cold too no doubt. They should have been given camphor to keep the smell from knocking them out, being accustomed now to the stench of their collective filth. They all came to the surface. They all were saved. The on lookers chanted for them. They cheered them on. They should have been given ear plugs to protect their ears from the screeching. Some kind of micro evolution had kicked in. Humans can evolve to live a life of darkness. To think they could return to the surface unchanged, is naive, almost sinister. It denies their humanity. They couldn't scream, or cry, only sit in stone silence like the stalagmites in a pool of standing water mixed with their excrement. Silently, preserving air, hoping for days that they would be rescued. A tripod with a single white wheel stood at the mouth of a hole drilled into the earth the width of a man's shoulders, and carried them to the surface. Some thing like being born from the earth. Going into world again, forever changed. Blindfolded, groped and touched, slapped on the back, and finally led into warm starched sleeve arms of the president, for the photo opportunity. I thought this would make a brilliant screenplay, a great great film done correctly, but it's already happened. It's all on camera. They were greeted by cheering crowds, brought to their families, and received a warm embrace.
.
.
Return to Omalass
I returned to Omalass.
I returned by ship on friendly sea,
greeted by the coast guard,
escorted to warm sandy shores.
I returned to the land,
I returned to the people,
and the people's country.
The years had been kind to me
The years had been cruel to the evil doers.
The old had faded, their names had passed
like wind over reeds, like ice
melts in the winter garden when the sun
shines on the people, in the people's country.
The wind had blown far and wide, and spread
a message of peace to the people in their land,
a message of prosperity to the disenfranchised,
'we are all Citizens now.'
But the seasons change, and guests are not
inhabitants, though they beg you to stay,
guests have a shelf life,
and trees which bear no fruit,
have no bounty to share beyond the colored season
in the lands and in the homes of the people.
Shades of gray fade as darkness falls again on the people
and on the people's land.
Light comes from torches, fire illuminates the skyline
and walls are tended to keep the hidden folk away
from their hearths.
No more guests, this evening.
I returned to Omalass,
but wish to leave my footprints where they fell,
where the expatriate played at being
the prodigal son, but could not tolerate the sins
of the father in the father's house.
Could not stomach the taste of bitter water,
and sour milk,
could not see the poor be cast to the jaws,
to the iron jaws of the dank jails and the cold
well lit streets.
I returned to Omalass expecting ruin,
expecting collapsing new structures
to dot the horizon as they had in the Old World.
I will to leave the land of the people yet again,
and set coarse for a quieter country,
and a quieter land of people,
I yearn to turn my back, and lie in the shadow
of the headless empire in one of the fallen lands.
Where they speak dead languages of dead empires,
where the fruit is as fresh as the air is musty,
and where streets team with human life.
I yearn to find my place among the dispossessed,
again among the farmers
again among the wives,
again among the fallen heroes who's voices
were silenced by the new world's thirsty arms.
And though those arms may come again to embrace this 'other' land,
and find me there among the lesser people
of the earth, let them come.
Let them drag me to Golgotha,
Let them try.
Let them cry 'Take Him to the Cross! Black Trader!
Crucify him and scatter his remains!'
Let them try.
Let them find me, twice removed from the eagle's
hard breast, whose milk, though t'was cold,
did nourish my body.
Let them whisper in my ear, as the hours fall in a white room.
Let them beg for my return.
Let them implore for me to see reason,
and return again as a fool.
Let them try,
Let them cry for me,
Let them yearn to see me fold.
I will be here should they wish to find me.
I will be waiting with the quiet people
in the shadow of Chimera,
waiting to see them rear their heads
against their native son once more
and remind them in a whisper,
who is watching
who is present
Them, and me, my people, our God
and history, watching,
waiting for the hammer to fall,
waiting for history to give us permission
to forget the name and the language of the People,
and the People's Land.
I returned to Omalass a guest,
Let me walk away again forever.
I returned by ship on friendly sea,
greeted by the coast guard,
escorted to warm sandy shores.
I returned to the land,
I returned to the people,
and the people's country.
The years had been kind to me
The years had been cruel to the evil doers.
The old had faded, their names had passed
like wind over reeds, like ice
melts in the winter garden when the sun
shines on the people, in the people's country.
The wind had blown far and wide, and spread
a message of peace to the people in their land,
a message of prosperity to the disenfranchised,
'we are all Citizens now.'
But the seasons change, and guests are not
inhabitants, though they beg you to stay,
guests have a shelf life,
and trees which bear no fruit,
have no bounty to share beyond the colored season
in the lands and in the homes of the people.
Shades of gray fade as darkness falls again on the people
and on the people's land.
Light comes from torches, fire illuminates the skyline
and walls are tended to keep the hidden folk away
from their hearths.
No more guests, this evening.
I returned to Omalass,
but wish to leave my footprints where they fell,
where the expatriate played at being
the prodigal son, but could not tolerate the sins
of the father in the father's house.
Could not stomach the taste of bitter water,
and sour milk,
could not see the poor be cast to the jaws,
to the iron jaws of the dank jails and the cold
well lit streets.
I returned to Omalass expecting ruin,
expecting collapsing new structures
to dot the horizon as they had in the Old World.
I will to leave the land of the people yet again,
and set coarse for a quieter country,
and a quieter land of people,
I yearn to turn my back, and lie in the shadow
of the headless empire in one of the fallen lands.
Where they speak dead languages of dead empires,
where the fruit is as fresh as the air is musty,
and where streets team with human life.
I yearn to find my place among the dispossessed,
again among the farmers
again among the wives,
again among the fallen heroes who's voices
were silenced by the new world's thirsty arms.
And though those arms may come again to embrace this 'other' land,
and find me there among the lesser people
of the earth, let them come.
Let them drag me to Golgotha,
Let them try.
Let them cry 'Take Him to the Cross! Black Trader!
Crucify him and scatter his remains!'
Let them try.
Let them find me, twice removed from the eagle's
hard breast, whose milk, though t'was cold,
did nourish my body.
Let them whisper in my ear, as the hours fall in a white room.
Let them beg for my return.
Let them implore for me to see reason,
and return again as a fool.
Let them try,
Let them cry for me,
Let them yearn to see me fold.
I will be here should they wish to find me.
I will be waiting with the quiet people
in the shadow of Chimera,
waiting to see them rear their heads
against their native son once more
and remind them in a whisper,
who is watching
who is present
Them, and me, my people, our God
and history, watching,
waiting for the hammer to fall,
waiting for history to give us permission
to forget the name and the language of the People,
and the People's Land.
I returned to Omalass a guest,
Let me walk away again forever.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
