Your eyes
can melt life into diamonds as cobalt
and seductive
as a folkloric ocean scene -
and that
is stating it simply.
Steady fingers,
kiss the lip
of your
immortality;
soft honyed wines
and browning ciders
will bleach living poetry
to your tongue,
permitting me
to lavish
in the metaphors found there.
Can you tell me that you love me,
simply?
Drape that night
about those silken,
steady fingers,
and kiss my heart
instead.
A clay-pitcherful of stars
burn there,
and long to be a drunken dance
of wild emotion,
swaying
and unsteadily balanced
upon
the curve
of my hips...
Tell me you love me, simply.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Black Beneath the Skin: "Spring Weeding"
Lick
your purple lips;
taste the sattire,
the bleeding irony
in your lies.
Is it as bitter as powdered cooking cocoa?
Or is it
a slow burn,
jalapeño juices clawing maliciously a
t your tastebuds,
laughing at your teeth
and what they won't cease to gnaw at?
Leave your tobacco spittle in hard,
frothing puddles
like black daisies
to a crack
in the sidewalk.
I've had enough of weeds
your purple lips;
taste the sattire,
the bleeding irony
in your lies.
Is it as bitter as powdered cooking cocoa?
Or is it
a slow burn,
jalapeño juices clawing maliciously a
t your tastebuds,
laughing at your teeth
and what they won't cease to gnaw at?
Leave your tobacco spittle in hard,
frothing puddles
like black daisies
to a crack
in the sidewalk.
I've had enough of weeds
Black Beneath the Skin: "Rythm in G-major"
There are rosary beads kissing the lint at your thighs;
but you shove
your hands
deep into your damaged sanity
instead.
Perhaps the maroon lips of prayers you've yet to utterintimidate you?
Is that why you step with rocks in your bombed out shell-toed sneakers?
Pieces
of your 'hood
weighing you down , like sediment
to a white man's saliva -
You'll always get caught flappin' your feet
uselessly
before red waves crashing on blue moons
if you don't remove
your city
from your Herme's slippers.
Feet were meant to fly.
So your wing-checked Nike's are good for nothing but dancing cuban sunset-drum-trumpet-nights awaywith empty hips,and barren,echoless steps of Victory...
like your oppressed peoples.
You're only stirring dustin the wastelands.
Those pebbles are just the leftover brainmatterof brown stepping stonesin a nappy-headed-cotton crowd.
Skulls bridging riverbeds;
necks crowning tree limbs.
I do not blame you for dragging that rythmic baggage,
because your prayers jingle like Christmas morning
in a shack too small to hold any green fern
ten acres down-wind
of the Big House.
But your teeth make sweet sounds too.
You are a metallic melody,
click-clack-cockin'-back the quick sour smack of sugar bullets
on your tongue.
It's gotten so that,
every profanity you spit murks one more wordless supplication to God
during a breeze-less
Brooklyn
summer
day.
What happens when you have no more hail mary's left to run to?
I guess,
you'll just take a muffled crip-walk-draggin'-rasping-yellow breath-city-skyline-storybook-cyphers-in Prospect Park-like verbal gang gunshots -
to your death.
...Your rosaries have flown away from you...
...and you ain't left wit nothin' but one last empty prayer.
Your own personal rapture.
Goodnight, young street-soldier.
but you shove
your hands
deep into your damaged sanity
instead.
Perhaps the maroon lips of prayers you've yet to utterintimidate you?
Is that why you step with rocks in your bombed out shell-toed sneakers?
Pieces
of your 'hood
weighing you down , like sediment
to a white man's saliva -
You'll always get caught flappin' your feet
uselessly
before red waves crashing on blue moons
if you don't remove
your city
from your Herme's slippers.
Feet were meant to fly.
So your wing-checked Nike's are good for nothing but dancing cuban sunset-drum-trumpet-nights awaywith empty hips,and barren,echoless steps of Victory...
like your oppressed peoples.
You're only stirring dustin the wastelands.
Those pebbles are just the leftover brainmatterof brown stepping stonesin a nappy-headed-cotton crowd.
Skulls bridging riverbeds;
necks crowning tree limbs.
I do not blame you for dragging that rythmic baggage,
because your prayers jingle like Christmas morning
in a shack too small to hold any green fern
ten acres down-wind
of the Big House.
But your teeth make sweet sounds too.
You are a metallic melody,
click-clack-cockin'-back the quick sour smack of sugar bullets
on your tongue.
It's gotten so that,
every profanity you spit murks one more wordless supplication to God
during a breeze-less
Brooklyn
summer
day.
What happens when you have no more hail mary's left to run to?
I guess,
you'll just take a muffled crip-walk-draggin'-rasping-yellow breath-city-skyline-storybook-cyphers-in Prospect Park-like verbal gang gunshots -
to your death.
...Your rosaries have flown away from you...
...and you ain't left wit nothin' but one last empty prayer.
Your own personal rapture.
Goodnight, young street-soldier.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Apartheid Vs. Segregation, and its affects on the Black Stereotype.
Apartheid and Segregation, though borne of two vastly different countries and cultures, embody the same principals and have both had their share of major historical events which have impacted the Civil Rights Movement through the decades. Take for example such happenings as the assasination of Patrice Lumumba in the once-Belgian colony of the Congo, and the assasinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in America. The slave trade in both countries ties them together in a bond that can never be broken, and the horrors of the Congolese Diamond mines, ghettos, and America's Jim Crow Laws, and the K.K.K. have shaped history and made the "Negro" man into a marketable stereotype.
"Apartheid : racial segregation ; specifically : a former policy of segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-European groups in the Republic of South Africa" (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apartheid)
- "Segregation : the separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group by enforced or voluntary residence in a restricted area, by barriers to social intercourse, by separate educational facilities, or by other discriminatory means" (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20segregation)
Apartheid was a political movement in in South Africa which effectively muffled over nine-million native tongues and civil freedoms, set into play by the occupying white-European nations. It seemed that, just when the 'American Negro' decided to take his fate into his own hands, and marching for his rights, his homeland's rights were being thrown into the dust. During this time, all native Africans, or anyone categorized as black by the Department of Home Affairs, a government bureau, was required to carry on his or her person a 'pass book' containing his photo identification, fingerprints, and any information regarding access to non-black areas. Natives of South Africa were dislocated from their tribal birth-lands and placed into new 'homelands' based on tribe or region of origin - and most often than not, these two factors were too loosely considered to be correct.
This was the shallow and meretriciously-painted mask that told the outside world that Apartheid would effectively give all blacks and coloured peoples citizenship and voting rights, if only within their respective homelands; however, in the dark and sinister heart of the beast, it was just a convenient way to keep black affairs out of white ones, and it helped secure the foreign occupation of the lands through economical means. It was a type of political rape, where the government was able to envelope all of South Africa within its hand, and spread its interminable disease of hatred for the white man throughout the jungles and dusty planes, before snatching it back, fist full of blood diamonds, rubber, and ivory. The Dutch and English sat back and got rich off of the sufferings of a nation already deprived of its children during the slave trade; now, the nation of 'Cain's descendents' was to lose all of its marketable glory as well.
With the destruction of their birth-lands, their tribes, and even to an extent, their seperate cultures as they were forced into ghettos and shanties made of tin and cardboard, or, if they were lucky, inexpensive brick or clay, and then the implimentation of a new language called Afrikaans, the blacks were thouroughly defeated. They had to speak in with slow tongues a language that was hard to grasp, hastily created by the Dutch and English to unify their peoples. They had to relearn the regions of their countries, as new European names were being scrawled over old African ones. They had to deal with the daily threat of police - for when it grew night, the raids would begin, and houses would be hit with blugeons and bullets. Local police would bulldoze from home to home, seizing any adult they found. Sometimes they would leave without a victim hanging from their arms, if they were appealed to with certain goods or valuables; sometimes, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles - even young sons - would be taken from their beds and brutally beaten, before being thrown into jail cells for detainment and posted for bail. There they would be stuck for weeks, or months - sometimes even years - before they were released back into society. All it really took was a little monetary appeasement by a family member or friend to nudge the wardens to finally look over the paper work and release the prisoner from detainment.
The modern African is a misogynist, a womanizer who lords himself over his household, goes off to work in the diamond mines and comes home with a few dollars in his pockets after bar - hopping all night. The woman is a piece of property, even moreso than the man is - a cattle's cattle. They are shackled to the state, with pockets wired directly to the government's greedy fingers.
Psychologically, these stereotypes probably arose from the mental mindset blacks have been put in as a result years of slavery and segregation. First, everything was taken from them in an instant. The ones that were able to remain were left with the shattering feeling that their world had been torn from beneath them. Before they could regain their dignity or fight for themselves, their lands were stolen, emptied of their precious natural resources, hunted for their furs and ivory tusks and renamed. Finally, even their languages, beautiful as they were, were stolen from them. The only thing a man had to his name was his wife and children. The only thing a woman had left was her soul. If a man could not be the ruler of his own life, a citizen of his own country, or recognize his rightful place within his tribe, then at least he could be the ruler of his household.
From these feelings of enmity towards the white man who had sucked their lives dry, and still did not see fit to retract his fangs and cease his thievery, arose Patrice Lumumba, the seeming savior of the Belgian Congo. When the Dutch had finally seen fit to 'withdraw' it's influences from its ancient and dilapidated conquest, and the country was put up to a free vote for its first natice-Congolese Prime Minister of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo, one man with a mighty voice and spitfire for speeches united his trodden peoples under a political banner that meant to dispell every last speck of white devil from their borders. His public addresses riled up the crowds of supporters so fearfully that, for a time, civil war broke out. In a country where a race of millions had been backed too far into a corner, they reared as one beast and began to fight with a feral and desperate anxiety.
But Patrice won his candidacy from a jail cell. It was no doubt that the Belgians had tried to break the man before he could rally the country into a full-out revolution, but they failed. After his election in June 23rd in 1960, whereupon he created the first free government of the Congo, he proceeded to struggle for his country, and for his life. However, that will to struggle on was forcefully taken from him when he was executed on January 17, 1961 by the Katanga recessionist regime.
((to be continued...))
"Apartheid : racial segregation ; specifically : a former policy of segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-European groups in the Republic of South Africa" (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apartheid)
- "Segregation : the separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group by enforced or voluntary residence in a restricted area, by barriers to social intercourse, by separate educational facilities, or by other discriminatory means" (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20segregation)
Apartheid was a political movement in in South Africa which effectively muffled over nine-million native tongues and civil freedoms, set into play by the occupying white-European nations. It seemed that, just when the 'American Negro' decided to take his fate into his own hands, and marching for his rights, his homeland's rights were being thrown into the dust. During this time, all native Africans, or anyone categorized as black by the Department of Home Affairs, a government bureau, was required to carry on his or her person a 'pass book' containing his photo identification, fingerprints, and any information regarding access to non-black areas. Natives of South Africa were dislocated from their tribal birth-lands and placed into new 'homelands' based on tribe or region of origin - and most often than not, these two factors were too loosely considered to be correct.
This was the shallow and meretriciously-painted mask that told the outside world that Apartheid would effectively give all blacks and coloured peoples citizenship and voting rights, if only within their respective homelands; however, in the dark and sinister heart of the beast, it was just a convenient way to keep black affairs out of white ones, and it helped secure the foreign occupation of the lands through economical means. It was a type of political rape, where the government was able to envelope all of South Africa within its hand, and spread its interminable disease of hatred for the white man throughout the jungles and dusty planes, before snatching it back, fist full of blood diamonds, rubber, and ivory. The Dutch and English sat back and got rich off of the sufferings of a nation already deprived of its children during the slave trade; now, the nation of 'Cain's descendents' was to lose all of its marketable glory as well.
With the destruction of their birth-lands, their tribes, and even to an extent, their seperate cultures as they were forced into ghettos and shanties made of tin and cardboard, or, if they were lucky, inexpensive brick or clay, and then the implimentation of a new language called Afrikaans, the blacks were thouroughly defeated. They had to speak in with slow tongues a language that was hard to grasp, hastily created by the Dutch and English to unify their peoples. They had to relearn the regions of their countries, as new European names were being scrawled over old African ones. They had to deal with the daily threat of police - for when it grew night, the raids would begin, and houses would be hit with blugeons and bullets. Local police would bulldoze from home to home, seizing any adult they found. Sometimes they would leave without a victim hanging from their arms, if they were appealed to with certain goods or valuables; sometimes, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles - even young sons - would be taken from their beds and brutally beaten, before being thrown into jail cells for detainment and posted for bail. There they would be stuck for weeks, or months - sometimes even years - before they were released back into society. All it really took was a little monetary appeasement by a family member or friend to nudge the wardens to finally look over the paper work and release the prisoner from detainment.
The modern African is a misogynist, a womanizer who lords himself over his household, goes off to work in the diamond mines and comes home with a few dollars in his pockets after bar - hopping all night. The woman is a piece of property, even moreso than the man is - a cattle's cattle. They are shackled to the state, with pockets wired directly to the government's greedy fingers.
Psychologically, these stereotypes probably arose from the mental mindset blacks have been put in as a result years of slavery and segregation. First, everything was taken from them in an instant. The ones that were able to remain were left with the shattering feeling that their world had been torn from beneath them. Before they could regain their dignity or fight for themselves, their lands were stolen, emptied of their precious natural resources, hunted for their furs and ivory tusks and renamed. Finally, even their languages, beautiful as they were, were stolen from them. The only thing a man had to his name was his wife and children. The only thing a woman had left was her soul. If a man could not be the ruler of his own life, a citizen of his own country, or recognize his rightful place within his tribe, then at least he could be the ruler of his household.
From these feelings of enmity towards the white man who had sucked their lives dry, and still did not see fit to retract his fangs and cease his thievery, arose Patrice Lumumba, the seeming savior of the Belgian Congo. When the Dutch had finally seen fit to 'withdraw' it's influences from its ancient and dilapidated conquest, and the country was put up to a free vote for its first natice-Congolese Prime Minister of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo, one man with a mighty voice and spitfire for speeches united his trodden peoples under a political banner that meant to dispell every last speck of white devil from their borders. His public addresses riled up the crowds of supporters so fearfully that, for a time, civil war broke out. In a country where a race of millions had been backed too far into a corner, they reared as one beast and began to fight with a feral and desperate anxiety.
But Patrice won his candidacy from a jail cell. It was no doubt that the Belgians had tried to break the man before he could rally the country into a full-out revolution, but they failed. After his election in June 23rd in 1960, whereupon he created the first free government of the Congo, he proceeded to struggle for his country, and for his life. However, that will to struggle on was forcefully taken from him when he was executed on January 17, 1961 by the Katanga recessionist regime.
((to be continued...))
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Palms Read - Protest the Hero
I am a legacy of forgotton dreams...
and I just want to find myself again.
If we will never answer to where we came from,
but only how we got here,
then I must describe to you the painful waters of dark mirth which birthed me,
the paint that peeled from my skin,
the blackest oil,
crude and still with its petroleum stamping value to nature,
which sloughed off in globs of self-hatred from the walls of my lungs,
where she breathed into me,
my personal porcelain God-dess,
with her smoker's breath
and cigarrette regrets,
where it left its obsidian fingerprints on my arms
like starless bruises;
If I must tell you how I got here,
then I'd reopen the wounds at the soles and heels of my broken feet and relive the agony of my million-mile march -
each step was a bloody footprint on a birth certificate,
and my hands itched to fling myself into the sky
and land upside down,
palms supporting my trek across the clouds -
because back then,
I had no wings to propel me to the heavens.
So don't ask me where I came from,
because the circumstances from which arose the severing of my mother's umbilical chord
and the noose around my father's neck
do not define what I have become -
I can only answer you
if you ask me how I got here...
I can only tell you the bare facts
and bitterness
of my skeletons and ghosts -
the ones that wreak havoc
and permeate the stench of what my death would have looked and sounded like -
click, BOOM -
somewhere on the paths I have traversed;
yet they fail to grasp the red dirt riverbed upon which I now stand
and leap
and run along
for the future up ahead is calling me like the sunrise
I wouldn't bare to lose.
Leave me to my dawns,
and save your questioning
for later.
and I just want to find myself again.
If we will never answer to where we came from,
but only how we got here,
then I must describe to you the painful waters of dark mirth which birthed me,
the paint that peeled from my skin,
the blackest oil,
crude and still with its petroleum stamping value to nature,
which sloughed off in globs of self-hatred from the walls of my lungs,
where she breathed into me,
my personal porcelain God-dess,
with her smoker's breath
and cigarrette regrets,
where it left its obsidian fingerprints on my arms
like starless bruises;
If I must tell you how I got here,
then I'd reopen the wounds at the soles and heels of my broken feet and relive the agony of my million-mile march -
each step was a bloody footprint on a birth certificate,
and my hands itched to fling myself into the sky
and land upside down,
palms supporting my trek across the clouds -
because back then,
I had no wings to propel me to the heavens.
So don't ask me where I came from,
because the circumstances from which arose the severing of my mother's umbilical chord
and the noose around my father's neck
do not define what I have become -
I can only answer you
if you ask me how I got here...
I can only tell you the bare facts
and bitterness
of my skeletons and ghosts -
the ones that wreak havoc
and permeate the stench of what my death would have looked and sounded like -
click, BOOM -
somewhere on the paths I have traversed;
yet they fail to grasp the red dirt riverbed upon which I now stand
and leap
and run along
for the future up ahead is calling me like the sunrise
I wouldn't bare to lose.
Leave me to my dawns,
and save your questioning
for later.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Momma's Child ((New Short Story? Possibly?))
She was too graceful.
I remember how she hated to wear shoes. Every summer Sunday afternoon, when the sun threw every green thing into shades of yellow, and her fair skin would tan momentarily to a warm margerine-like color, she would deliberately slide off her heels, place them side-by-side on the porch, and walk with bare feet and a light dance in her step through the tall grass. It was a kind of magic, the way the breeze would play with her floral skirt.
I tried to pick out the cursive symbols in her walnut curls; I imagined that they wove sweet love poems to me.
She was like honey. And I called her Momma.
But Master and Mammy didn't permit me to call her that. So I kept it tucked behind my tongue, and played with it on the backs of my teeth, suckling the penny's worth of comfort that it gave me.
I wasn't allowed to see Momma, either. I had to hide behind the chicken-wire fencing beneath the porch just to watch her dance on Sunday evenings. I remember how the sun would cast its cage-like shadows across my face, and how I would poke at the boxes they made in the dirt around me, and I would gaze at those verses and beautiful words waving at me as she strolled; I would smile because I knew I was born from them. I didn't come from Momma's stomach, like all the other Negro children did from their Mammies - I came from her hair. I came from the soundless songs plucking at every strand.
My skin even retained their color.
And I knew she saw me there, underneath that porch. Sometimes, she would glance in the direction of my hiding place, my cage, and her lips would quirk slightly upwards before she returned to her attention to her hips. Her hazel eyes whispered to mine - they were just like hers. We were twins, joined by the umbilical chord cut haphazardly from our waists.
I longed to see if the inside of her arms were as warm and gentle as her smile, if they felt like butter, or the expensive lilac lotions she wore. I ached to see if there was love in her embrace for me.
But she wasn't allowed to touch me. She wasn't supposed to know that I existed anymore.
Master took care of that - he put me in a shack so small it was like a chicken-coup, but only with one mother hen to look out for us chicks. There were a lot of us pickaninnies there, who had no fathers and no mothers. But I knew where they came from. They were Master's rejected children, the ones he couldn't bare to look at because of the dirt of their handsom little bodies, or the features that too closely resembled those who broke their backs and minds for him inside the boiling sugar cane smelts.
He sold their mothers to his neighbors, and even though they were just beyond the fence, they never visited their babies like some slaves who were seperated from their kin did. I'm guessing that they just didn't want to remember the pain ripped inside of them from losing their precious bare-foot kingdom, with the lively-patterend cloths, and the grasses that went on forever, only to be engulfed by the biggest setting sun ever seen - just to find that their wombs couldn't be precious any longer, but cut wide and sold from greedy hand to greedy, bloody hand, until their breasts fell flat from their chests and age defiled the worry in their faces.
But I wasn't like them. I was Momma's child, and I knew it.
And she knew me.
I remember how she hated to wear shoes. Every summer Sunday afternoon, when the sun threw every green thing into shades of yellow, and her fair skin would tan momentarily to a warm margerine-like color, she would deliberately slide off her heels, place them side-by-side on the porch, and walk with bare feet and a light dance in her step through the tall grass. It was a kind of magic, the way the breeze would play with her floral skirt.
I tried to pick out the cursive symbols in her walnut curls; I imagined that they wove sweet love poems to me.
She was like honey. And I called her Momma.
But Master and Mammy didn't permit me to call her that. So I kept it tucked behind my tongue, and played with it on the backs of my teeth, suckling the penny's worth of comfort that it gave me.
I wasn't allowed to see Momma, either. I had to hide behind the chicken-wire fencing beneath the porch just to watch her dance on Sunday evenings. I remember how the sun would cast its cage-like shadows across my face, and how I would poke at the boxes they made in the dirt around me, and I would gaze at those verses and beautiful words waving at me as she strolled; I would smile because I knew I was born from them. I didn't come from Momma's stomach, like all the other Negro children did from their Mammies - I came from her hair. I came from the soundless songs plucking at every strand.
My skin even retained their color.
And I knew she saw me there, underneath that porch. Sometimes, she would glance in the direction of my hiding place, my cage, and her lips would quirk slightly upwards before she returned to her attention to her hips. Her hazel eyes whispered to mine - they were just like hers. We were twins, joined by the umbilical chord cut haphazardly from our waists.
I longed to see if the inside of her arms were as warm and gentle as her smile, if they felt like butter, or the expensive lilac lotions she wore. I ached to see if there was love in her embrace for me.
But she wasn't allowed to touch me. She wasn't supposed to know that I existed anymore.
Master took care of that - he put me in a shack so small it was like a chicken-coup, but only with one mother hen to look out for us chicks. There were a lot of us pickaninnies there, who had no fathers and no mothers. But I knew where they came from. They were Master's rejected children, the ones he couldn't bare to look at because of the dirt of their handsom little bodies, or the features that too closely resembled those who broke their backs and minds for him inside the boiling sugar cane smelts.
He sold their mothers to his neighbors, and even though they were just beyond the fence, they never visited their babies like some slaves who were seperated from their kin did. I'm guessing that they just didn't want to remember the pain ripped inside of them from losing their precious bare-foot kingdom, with the lively-patterend cloths, and the grasses that went on forever, only to be engulfed by the biggest setting sun ever seen - just to find that their wombs couldn't be precious any longer, but cut wide and sold from greedy hand to greedy, bloody hand, until their breasts fell flat from their chests and age defiled the worry in their faces.
But I wasn't like them. I was Momma's child, and I knew it.
And she knew me.
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