…this morning with an image in my head of young people dancing around a fire which led to me to a freewrite.
It is a work in progress, feedback is appreciated. Maybe I can turn this into a complete piece. and if the image inspires you then you should free write too!
we are
a pulsing mass of flesh
with pounding war drum heart beats
dancing in single rhythm around fire
in the belly pit of a 7 headed hydra beast
awoken is a raging generation of bullet proof idealists
and ticking time bomb libidos
we get off on big brother watching
while we siren wail our songs till walls sweat
our last nights getting over
we are the people that carry bucket lists on the tips of our tongues
and on the soles of our feet
tap dance on a powder keg with matches between our teeth
a conscious out of body instrument tuned to perfect pitch
one note vibration
won’t let anyone tell us we aint got this, because we do
listen to what our drop the beat box preacher says
Today is for us. The ones who read the books and saw the same signs
hindsight lent us a prophecy and told us embrace the instant
insanity
its the only way to make moves
make moves
like jazz nights make the streets wet with panting heat
like leaving the lights on and the trail of dawn on our bedroom floors
people. we are so human
and we know it
led by a procession of dancing brides carrying folk songs
in the lace wrapped between their fingertips
leaping and twisting back and forth in the sway of jasmine scented exhale
this is militant celebration
reclamation of skin bone and
knowing not too much is written in stone
we will not kneel to a God that does not dance in our revolution
and we will go willingly with a winter nights heave into dingy bars and
basement night clubs
pouring ourselves into strangers with the same passion for loose fingertips and
pressed up tight, hips
this is lift and take off
this is resistance in the romance of pen sounds on the back of spiraled infinity
this is the takeover of scorpion tongued youth with nothing to lose
no concepts of things not to do
we are as cool as a raindrop caught in the palm of an April bud sleeping in shade
we are that same kind of fragile too
with an affinity for seeing things in utopia sapphire blue
found our innocence in the unravel of strings on a pair of worn out shoes
we all know we aint got a clue
generous
with his foolishness,
it spills
from deep pockets
and sticks
unwanted
to the bottoms
of wandering soles,
worn off
with
a tread that heaves,
every step.
Teeth
for cousin gideon, who drove us to massawa
Two sisters ride down with us
to Massawa’s liberation celebration.
One sister is the color of injera; her teeth are big and stuck-out.
One sister is a cinnamon stick.
Their almond eyes are the same.
The ink black hair falls beautiful down their backs.
I see that you love one of them & change my mind
many times about which I choose for you.
Months later, I will show their photographs to my father
who will laugh & say he knows,
‘It is this one,’ he will say, surely, pointing
to the woman whose teeth stay in her mouth.
(What man will choose a woman
whose mouth is stronger than his hands?)
But, cousin, for you I choose the older one
whose teeth might be bullets of ivory;
I imagine that from this mouth:
kites,
rain,
ax equal to lace, the yellow & lick
of a jar filled with
the sweet of stinging bees.
Have you ever felt helpless?
Have you ever preferred the numbness?
Despite the fact that you are desperately aware of the cowardice you have chosen.
Have you ever felt so much you begin to feel nothing?
I died 3 years ago. It was the last time I heard my people’s voice bubble under blood bath.
I’ve been in limbo ever since.
So I ran. To be closer to a home I’ve only met once. I’ve seen bodies drop around me but still never felt so far from human.
The reality is, what is left to say that hasn’t already been said?
There are enough war stories and open wounds to weave blankets of last breaths.
I died 3 years ago and found solace in death.
Tell me it isn’t selfish to stand face to face with a martyrs bloodied clothes.
He was a red cheeked, round faced 17 year old boy, who knew wisdom would not come with age.
That we are the kind of people that mixed kerosene with our sage, and waited for anyone with a half lit match to set off a forest fire worth of martyr complex
There is nothing funny about choosing death
I have thought about dropping myself into the trenches since before I learned to tell time
Have you ever felt helpless, like being beyond 10 inch bullet proof glass
The begging of “please, let me pass”and being turned away?
I am not a poet. My words carry no weight. Nor can they take flight and reach a heaven filled with children who will not be tucked into bed tonight.
This is not a poem, this is a guilt ridden confession.
I say I will raise my babies Arab. Breast feed them poetry of political prisoners and every lullaby would be a freedom song.
But truth is, I may not. I may just let them live.
You see, I’ve been dead for 3 years now. No one has seemed to notice. Either life has gone on as usual or this is one long funeral.
I wouldn’t bother writing eulogy. I haven’t found a way to weave the faces into notebook pages.
And there is something about sharing a cup of coffee with a woman missing her youngest son that makes words
and worlds
insignificant.
How do I tell her that kids like us were not meant for fairy tales?
That they don’t teach us justice in class.
There is just us to fend for ourselves and 64 years worth of everybody else.
It doesn’t seem fair.
Have you ever felt like the last ambulance driver in Baghdad, clutching his steering wheel vice grip around the howling of bombs and passengers?
Do you remember the screaming in the dark?
I don’t. I remember waking up to a world that already forgot.
I sat in a pantomimed chorus of conversation where everyone says everything at the same time till we all sound like the same nothing.
I have felt helpless. Even more I have felt useless.
I have drowned in my own skin, tried to pull every vein out of every limb.
I’ve clawed into the flesh of a flag, which stands for nothing more than too many aged warrior’s regrets.
But where is this going?
For me, there is only this left…
Dear Milad,
One year ago today they called you martyr as if divine birth wasn’t your first name. I was in Falestine for the first time. They held me on the bridge for 8 hours. I imagine your mother wished to hold you with that kind of power.
She told me she dreamt of you for a week, returning home draped in green silk. Your best friends carried you home in their arms, drenched in your blood. I sat with her for hours. She showed me your bedroom, the new shoes she bought you, and the bullet hole in the last white t-shirt you wore.
And after all of this, she simply poured me a cup of coffee. You know they say what happened in Gaza 3 years ago was our Sabra and Shatila. The suffocating in your own – “How can I sit and watch this?” – is something I figured you felt too.
How else could you walk out the door knowing there would be no coming home?
Truth be told. I walked out the same door too. I never looked back, I never said a word about you.
I left living and the will for feeling with the last 1400 mothers that lost boys who looked just like you.
And all of this. These words, this show are the most and the very least I could do.
Milad, I’m sorry that I couldn’t join you…and that I wanted to.
Dear Blogosphere,
I haven’t posted a single thing in a very long time. A lot has changed, and I have had little time to write and almost no inspiration.
However, due to an upcoming performance and the 1 year anniversary of my first entry into a homeland I had never known. Today is also Nakba (Catastrophe) Day. It is the anniversary of the creation of the apartheid Israeli state and the remembrance of every atrocity that has followed.
I forced myself into finishing a poem I’ve been wanting to write for almost exactly 365 days.
It is about a visit I made to a young boy’s home, and meeting his grieving family. The next post you read will be that poem.
Hiya, I have two to submit. They are meant to be read together and I wrote them many years ago.
An innocent face
A smiling mouth,
Wings of lace,
Flying South.
An angel there,
Watching me,
Golden Flowing,
Smoothened hair.
All that’s said,
Is dead and gone,
No more bed,
To pray upon.
Life is hard,
And life is cruel,
The light is dark,
And love a fool.
To think a child,
Oh one so young,
So meek and mild,
Could have this done.
An innocent face,
A smiling mouth,
Wings of coal,
Crawling south.
From peace to fear,
Fear to hate,
Its all too near,
Its all too late.
A loving father,
Who gives yet takes,
Striving harder,
Until it breaks.
Too many hurts,
To heal the wounds,
My blood it spurts,
Around as fumes.
An innocent face,
A broken heart,
A new place,
A new start.
Series exploring the extraordinary underground music generated by the Black Power and Black Arts movement of the late Sixties
hosted by Erykah Badu.
amazing
One of my favorite poems. Moving, erotic.
The Love Poems of Marichiko (l978) represents an order of love verse strikingly different in some ways from all Rexroth’s other love verse and remarkable for a man in his late sixties. Marichiko is a sequential verse narrative of sixty short verses supposedly written by a Japanese “poetess” named Marichiko that Rexroth claims to have translated. Actually, Rexroth wrote the Marichiko poems. In short, the series comprises a mini-tragedy of being loved and left. (http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rexroth/gutierrez.htm)
IV
You ask me what I thought about
Before we were lovers.
The answer is easy.
Before I met you
I didn’t have anything to think about.
VII
Making Love with you
Is like drinking sea water.
The more I drink
The thirstier I become,
Until nothing can slake my thirst
But to drink the entire sea.
IX
You wake me,
Part my thighs, and kiss me.
I give you the dew
Of the first morning of the world.
XXV
Your tongue thrums and moves
Into me, and I become
Hollow and blaze with
Whirling light, like the inside
Of a vast expanding pearl.
XXVII
As I came from the
Hot bath, you took me before
The horizontal mirror
Beside the low bed, while my
Breasts quivered in your hands, my
Buttocks shivered against you.
XXXI
Some day in six inches of
Ashes will be all
That’s left of our passionate minds,
Of all the world created
By our love, its origin
And passing away.
XXXII
I hold your head tight between
My thighs, and press against your
Mouth, and float away
Forever, in an orchid
Boat on the River of Heaven.
XXXIII
I cannot forget
The perfumed dusk inside the
Tent of my black hair,
As we awoke to make love
After a long night of love.
XXXIV
Every morning, I
Wake alone, dreaming my
Arm is your sweet flesh
Pressing my lips.
