A New Way

In our new way

We saw the electricity finally that had been there all this time as if a current had exploded right in front of us demanding to be seen and not necessarily heard…but acknowledged. Its joy had returned. As if the television went from Black and white into technicolor. And all that time we held our breathes foolishly, as if we were not going to make it. And we realized we were 44 not 14 and that was a beautiful thing… because although we’d seen the lower depths we could at least now imagine the greatest heights. And that was good enough. And if colors can remind you of that- or even your own reflection in the mirror (finally) well damn it you’ve kicked the insides of the snipers who await silently with the cops in your head ready to arrest your bliss at any moment. You won. And you can’t believe it. Cause you could never simply admit that you were worth more than the world you entered wanted you to believe.

“Portrait” Drawing by Joshua Kibuka (c) 2020

Spleen

The more honest you are in your art, the more dishonest you feel you haveto become in your life.

There’s something broken down, something imminent when you’ve spilled your guts.  And you can’t go back and say sorry or I didn’t mean that.  Truth, like baby chicks, need to be protected. But we don’t live in no incubator. As soon as you leave the art or whatever you may have created – even if its just a thought or a perfunctory mark on the cave wall (to prove you existed) – you have a choice to make when you back out into “their” world.  You can swim upstream and go against the current – but you must be prepared to pay the price. It’s hard revealing the boils and sores on your soul, it’s like an acne-marred face that could be beautiful if it could see beyond itself and into another person’s eyes…I shared a photograph that I took of a lovely woman with a “mental affliction” who had the greatest glimmer I had ever seen, in fact she made me almost ashamed to complain about the death-riot in my head and my dry mouth…I showed it to my counselor and they all neatly decided there was something wrong with me.  Why?  Cause in the photo a splendid stream of saliva stretched across the yarn of this young woman’s face like a St. Bernard in all its glory.  And they said that was sick, that I was a sick sick man.

And I lied and said “Oh, my.  I did not notice that.  That’s obviously a mistake, of course that’s not beautiful, of course I don’t think – “

But it was too late.

Now I’m done, un-done, with none, kaput. Finished.

And so because I no longer have to worry about offending the people whose obscene views of life berate and insult me I can at least – again – be honest and free to not be embarrassed by my desire to feel or be feeled or be feel-ing…all that spins and flows through my veins.

And now, especially, when they say: “Oh, may I share a poem with you?”
I will watch to see where it comes from.

And if they pull it out of their pocket instead of their spleen I’ll know that I am still in hell.

(originally published in the 2010 chapbook Lying Meat)

Zedekoah 5: Create Your Own

Create your own.  Don’t join.  Ever.  When you seek to join you aim to give up freedom and possibilities that you have not yet even tested or given any attention to.  If the world is so interesting and so compelling why are so many people , especially artists, in a rush to join organizations, festivals, groups, committees, schools, etc – that do nothing but coerce them into giving up their own off beat for the steady hum-drum of the Zeitgeist Parade?  If you’re lonely and are seeking “understanding” or allies after years of pounding pavements or digging trenches then either consider getting a dog…or joining yourself first.  Allies will come. And I do believe in miracles.  But you must first cherish the loneliness, the outsider within.  It may be the only honest thing in your life. But for the love of man or animal or cloud or tree – please don’t sell out…in order to buy in.

Sometimes the answers are in the loneliness of a 2AM letter or text message or phone call…

Sad Days for Free

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It was the type of beauty that makes an artist jealous or an atheist create a religion.

The woman’s face seemed to say “Handle With Care”. Her features were etched with a loving poise as if the brush across her face said to its own bristles: “Check this out.” Her lips had the sculpted and untouched look of a marble statue or a grandmother’s china set. Majestic, but almost too sterile. But so real that you knew if you touched it, you could break it. The delicacy of her face hosted a pair of bright cavernous eyes. They seemed deep and endless, a Xanadu unto herself. And just as lonely, perhaps. Her hair waved and nestled around her head. And her collarbone, too, seemed unloved and therefore all the more inviting. Her breasts hung and bobbed naturally, barely hidden beneath a thin wisp of loose cotton. The Maestro’s mouth twisted dumbly and his eyes ached. He felt bad about every negative comment he had ever made about women. Or life.

He watched her cross the street and saw the poetry in her gait, her bent head, tired arms. What he had always read about in dance books is what this woman was. The purity of her movement–was a great deal to take because it championed the “Beauty of a Better Tomorrow” philosophy in today. Her demeanor was confident, but mortal. And her curved marble lips were not pursed for her victim; they were curled up for grace. A shift of one minor muscle and it would have read as a smirk. All that beauty, like the blanket of stars at night, swimming through this sea of contempt, unpleasantness, and bitter digitized Eleanor Rigby’s of the world.
Seen, but not valued.
Hated because it lived and breathed.
Scorned because she was beautiful, but not wealthy.
Single, but not lonely.
Happy, but not ignorant.
And it was in the way she bent down to adjust her shoes that the trembles started and pain swelled…

He had to do something; he was still dizzy from his episode minutes earlier. He sucked on his dwindling saliva and hummed. Her tiny ballet shot adrenaline-razors through his veins.

Her shoes: tattered, worn, and dejected. But treated like the hands of Moses. She was so casual that it frightened him. The cardboard around her feet were folded and molded like moccasins. The shoestrings were made of wire like un-done hangers. If it hadn’t been for sanguine stretching for August, the stitches, like crimson thorns stuck in benign berry–he would have never noticed…And that is what continued to pain him.
Her refusal to crumble in between the pitied streets of a broken cabaret city and a metropolis frozen in spirit, caught between two different chords–minors and majors clashing and bending like fists in a boxing ring twirling with the sprays of sweat drooling on the grooves and in between the rich peoples’ collars, made him sad. And he looked and he could feel the threads of yesterday’s train pulling and hooting at some lonely distant region of his brain. Her old fashioned elegance reminded him of those black and white movies from the 1940’s and instantly his parents, who always appeared larger in his memory, came to him with comforting compassion and an immense yard of broken TV’s, each gripping its thwarted dream…

He revolted when he imagined the pain of her footsteps,–but like everyone else with a battered soul, shot nerves, and no hope–all he could do was stare and stand motionlessly. At least he gave her full attention. She removed all her clothing and ejected a rolled up ball of tissue in between her legs to help stop Aunt Rosa’s mighty flow. Sadder than an unemployed man’s footprints in the snow on New Year’s Eve.
Sadder than a subway ride on a Sunday afternoon.
Sadder than people who believe that hunger isn’t murder.
Sadder than a last minute pack or an eviction notice in the strange cool air of the summer solstice.
Sadder than a cemetery with gum on its fence.
And sadder than the boys who know who their fathers are–but have no desire to be like them.

*
— from “The Maestro” (2006)

Listen to the excerpt recorded here as a ‘Monocord.’

[photo of the author, Berlin, Germany at Bertolt Brecht’s grave, 2006.]

Originally published in the Outlaw Poetry Network

Zedekoah 4: Angela & Jean

The Protest Artist is like the ice upon a body of water; it’s the frozen lake – enabling the Activists (realizers of the vision) to carry themselves OVER the water to the other side, 

the artist is the bridge

the crossing is the activist, the arrival is the fight (revolution).  You can’t have one without the other.
The artist receives the prophecy, the activist must decide what to do with the prophecy.

The artist is the seer
the activist is the doer

(Somewhere in between…is the Actor)

—-preface to the poem “Coda for My Shadow”

[or The World Is Becoming Acquainted with the names of Dead Black Men’]

Angela Davis and Jean Genet in conversation, New York City 1969 at a​n Arts Festival. ​(Photo by Robert Cohen, circa 1969​ – ​ from page 69 of Art of Protest by TV Reed)

​The spring of 1969: as the Paris rebellions failed, a​ conference about the Black Panthers Theater took place in Oakland​,​ which ended in an argument about the direction the theater should take – ​ which by this point was in demise due to FBI infiltration.​..Angela Davis and Jean Genet confer before embarking on two separate routes to the same ultimate destination.

*

ANGELA DAVIS: If only I could only revolt as well as you create plays

JEAN GENET: No, if only I could write as elegantly as you revolt…if my words were as dangerous as your eyes I would not have the urge any longer to dream of a future. Instead I’d be living it.

AD: Yes but I was endgaming to the end of our imagination; I picked up a gun while you could still pick up a pen.

JG: The pen is not mightier than the sword.   It’s just more scary.

AD: If our words and actions were one we wouldn’t have to have this discussion. We could overturn society’s injustice with the swivel of a gun and the precision of a play and so…the world would not be a stage it would be our sun. And the sun is merely a star.

JG: But unfortunately for a star to exist one must be surrounded by darkness.

AD: “Let’s make new light out of love and erase all the darkness that comes with it.”  (I read that somewhere last year.  I think it was Bullins or Jackmon who wrote it; Huey had it painted on the back wall of one of Fred’s theater spaces in Chicago.)

JG: Is that act one or two?

AD: It’s the whole play

Or when the play –

JG: ceases to to be a play.

— Teeming Towards Triple Threats: Revolution in Radio Drama for a Podcast Age Vol. I 

Stay tuned for further information regarding transmission and production of the recorded podcast series: “Rebel Radio: Audio Works for a New Age” – coming this fall in conjugal with Speller Street Films LLC. 

 

Coda for My Shadow

The world is becoming more acquainted with the names of dead Black Men as opposed to living ones

We’ve been tamed and perverted

into caring

when a Black Person gets murdered

uttering liberal platitudes and marching

instead of fighting for them – when they are alive. We’re all in collusion. Black men, in particular, like Christ or the Artist, are preferred dead. They’re easier to love and remember then. We prefer to mourn the dead rather than praise the living. While it is true most people on the planet — living or dead — don’t deserve an after-thought in the cosmos, there are still uniquely luminous individuals among us,

quite often they are loners or at the end of the line

or perhaps they startle when entering the café

or mesmerize when crossing the street,

sometimes it’s their words or voice we remember

or the scent of their clothes.

But it is safe to say that these people are never in positions of power. When they are — their murders sting, but they don’t surprise. Instead, we pretend we’re shocked when a harmless child or a struggling beaten down member of the Proletariat get killed. But all along we were just riding beside that Police Car, dispatching ourselves to the Fascists and believing in the sacrifice of our own

rather than the annihilation of a system

that seeks to destroy the Colored Man

with text, on screen, over radio, and in flesh.

Imagine a world where there will be no more funerals because there will be no more soil left to cover the bodies of the exterminated.

 

[The splendid painting “The Proud Father” above is by the South African painter, Gerard Sekoto, 1947. ]

In the Kangalee Zone No. 215

                    

“And if you keep the distance of a moose between you and yourself you’ll be alright.”

                                                                          *

The rocks were black and the waves spilled oil.  Queer snow and purple skies. 

He shivered with delight and exhaustion as he adjusted Cary’s coat and proudly lifted his hood.  He remembered when a hood and just a dash of common sense were all you needed.  How sweet were those illusions, those delusions, and those offensive lies.  The patches of ice melting and the swimming corpses less than six blocks away had proven that maybe they always were, and would be, powerless.

The General never did get Cary transferred to another hospital, but he got him out of the fake hell and into the real one and he was proud to stand with his son as civilization took its last sigh and all he hoped for was a joyful exit.  It saddened him to think of the plastic man who never made it and Maria who poisoned herself with crayons.  Their last remnant of consciousness was four white walls and the stain of dead ladybugs.  But he could no longer reference or rewind.  He pulled Cary up on to his shoulders and they maneuvered with the rest of the tribe eager to exhale and be free one last instant or for the first time in their life…

The cold mountain top. 

Shrubs, hollow berries, and sand that still moved. 

They had made it. 

They achieved the impossible and were able to feel their humanity slip away.  And if they could not fight their disease and the makers of their disease – they could at least mourn for them. These people were able to laugh and cry one last time in the dusk of life.  One last time.  And as the moon began to whistle slowly down towards them, the General closed his boy’s eyes as they all turned to the magistrate and listened to their fate. 

Purple sky.

Queer snow.

Chills not knowing which way to flow.

The magistrate hung on to that final sound of himself clearing his own throat:

“…And the sky rained body parts.”

                                                              *

© from Holy Rant 215 April 4, 2020; excerpt from the short story Where Ladybugs Go to Die, September 9, 2006.

 

They Prefer You Dead

cause you’re safe that way

(all artists are).

Especially the ones with vision. I don’t have vision, at best I’m a dim light bulb flickering in someone’s basement. But I’ll tell you this: the filament in my bulb was anointed with the blood and energy of yours; and what I’ve learned in this concrete jungle, this new age urbane artistic wasteland is to keep not someone’s dream alive – not even my own – but to keep booring holes thru parasols and allow any bit of truth to seep through.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s grave in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn NY. March 2019

The took you cause they thought they owned you–perhaps they did, perhaps
You made your own deal with the devil, who am I to say.
There are certainly no angels to consort with

— but now creeping into the end of the first quarter of the 21st century we will discover one day that

The saints were those who became mistaken martyrs – not because of someone else 
But because of us
And all who let ourselves down
Keep crushing those fingers,
Keep crushing those cray-ons
My soul too needs something to wear.