One a.m. Zeus

Organizing notes, editing the book, oblation of the word listening to Zeus hurl bravado in midnight burlesque outside the window. A revolution of thunder is intimate. Makes me remember all the other poets and madcap dreamers out there hearing the hoopla together, raising an ear in the sleepless embrace.

Reality show: update on out-of-city folk Confederate Mount Rushmore field trip edition 20170502

A community of peoples does not need to maintain the litany of names on streets, statues, or buildings etc. in perpetuity. Doing so truncates space for burgeoning epochs and seasonal evolutions in a fixed geographic area. Stagnancy leads to veneration of only the isolated truths of the empowered in the aperture of naming.

A statue is built. A statue is taken down. A name is awarded. Another in time supplants. The vacated space is a canvas for reinvention not evisceration of memory. Candle light moves focus of who a community is. The spectrum broadens to encompass interconnection.

We accept values associated with chosen symbols are us. When those values change, it is not an indictment of the man on the statue, but of recognition of the shift in the community from one season to the next acknowledging both pain and new birth. The statue was never the singular human, not the old stone or the new. The old statues and names in this overdue historical pivot represent genocide, the most mendacious economic historical exploitation in American history, and state-sanctioned endorsement of mythological white supremacy.

The protest of removal at the root is repression of participation in pain. Slavery is pain. Dying for injustice in a gray uniform is lesser, but still present pain. The man in stars and bars today is a latent costume of an old hoodwinked ignorance. We each bear capacity to learn, to grow in interconnection acknowledging the psychic and macroeconomic systems that poison the seed of the learned mind. Sentences like, "My ancestors were wrong. I am wrong. I was used and I am angry. I forgive myself. I am brave enough to change, to let go of this hurt and grow." That is the path through this rubble.

http://www.wwltv.com/news/large-crowd-of-protesters-demonstrating-at-jefferson-davis-monument/435848719?c=da90sp%5Bdnfa

May Day 20170501

Today is May Day, a re-invigoration of focus for international workers, but America moves to September to be separate from the world, to intentionally disconnect our humanity and interconnection with ideas like socialism or workers rights on a human basis. Forty-hour work-week. Eight-hour work-day. Safer working conditions. Let the workers have a one hand count of days off a year, but let those days be soaked in religion, nationalism, and stories of gods to cover up the old gods. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Fourth of July, New Years Day, Veterans Day… May Day in America. Ignore. Move to September 1 instead of May 1. Dislodge. 

Why does America have a weekend: strikers in packing and steel plants, rail and ship yards. Docks paid blood for social justice. Die in fires for safer working conditions. Unionists, anarchists, socialists, communists, populists were jailed, threatened, deported and held shards of a crimson lens against factory orders. No founding father or boss granted, blood on the factory floor is the only trickle-down economics. Why, because human self-hatred is inculcated to make us believe in a zero sum game. If our sister or brother is paid fairly there is less for us rather than dollars sleeping in a bank account of a faceless internationally traded corporation. We cannot see international workers keep any marginal differences in the profit of how Ayn Rand's engine of the world revs. Power is in empathy, love, and our interconnection that hot sweat in the undergarments of any woman or man laboring to put the food on the shelf in a grocery store, a shingle on a roof, move a digit in a computer is of equal temperature and that heart is as infinitely deep in common membership in this universe. We do not get equal pay, nor should we, but living wages, equitable health benefit, taxes on capital as functional maximum wage laws, and working conditions matter. There are no unimportant people.

Stars and Bars and Stripes

This is our mirror, the values inverted in stars and bars of our pallid indifference to the tyranny of the stars and stripes. In the fetid gut of Americanism is imperialism, genocide of indigenous and African, supporter of dictators as the carnival barker of war-machines. The statures are effigies on the altar of grim id comfortable with the economics of death. Ballot boxes, triggers, and the cold white noise of immunity.

Sometimes I by Rising Appalachia

Every time I listen to this song, it is a prayer that it reaches a flip of heart-skin vulnerable and longing for an ancient memory of faith in love, in being human in the co-participation in seasons of unrepentant entropy. I cover my mouth, smile, and cry into the waves.

Listening to this once a day is a form of maintaining sobriety from depression, interconnection from attempted in a shadow of solitude roaming, writing these vagabond road-poet pages, kinship with the gravel and trunks, skyward without the head-pat, shoulder-rub of god or a tender face. Sometimes the ache. Sometimes I cry, the freight-train lovers and the enigmatic flag of hope raised upon my mast. Sometimes I close my eyes in meditative yogic dream and know that the voices I hear are all of you existing praying too in the in between silence. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRQg4CnYNeA

Knocking Doors

On some level we are all the kid in us knocking on doors, hoping the knob turns from someone else's insides to ask, "Can you come out to play?" Everybody feels alone, has pain, wants to feel seen and heard. Ask someone to play with you and watch a universe be born.

Jazz Fest First day April 28, 2017

Dawn New Orleans slow crow

Thursday night lullaby into Friday morning

Baptiste baptism cracked side walk

Federalist papers on iPod earbuds

Stick inspect backpack, brush past Gospel tent

Blues tent Mr. Sipp Mississippi Blues Child

Rouse guitar into slow-drink Sam Cooke

A Change is Gonna Come to majority over fifty white stay-seated audience

Finale breaks Hendrix blues Star Spangled

See crowd rise hand over hearts to imagined flag

Standing ovation rabble chords

Me seated reading Vandana Shiva Soil Not Oil

Energy is Shakti the primordial power of creation

The self-organizing, the self-generative

Self-renewing created force of the universe in feminism

Leon Bridges soul sex and Otis Redding

Torpid rise take me to your river

White boy cell phone purple VIP Acura chest-sticker

Black hundred-dollar t-shirt says “Envy” with white etched roses

Cat’s Meow Karaoke passes sky-banner

Two seagulls hover, one shits, drop falls 

Baseball cap says ‘Merica on a Trump-ling

Our nation’s flag has now become a social conservative identifier

The micro-allegiances, cigarette,

Three fuck-boys to the left all staring in cell phones

Leon on stage singing ‘Brown Skinned Girl’

Me remembering making out with a lovely Jewish woman

Outside Tipitina’s with his saxophone in the air

Tattooed Chinese character ankle British freckle sways with a Coors

“Oh she’s wasted,” trips over bags yells garble-talk back at a black woman

Imperialist alcohol manifest destiny bladder rush

The ennui of heat, Leon Bridges groove

No one can stare straight at sex

A crowd staring a crowd

Calculating drunk, high, and horny, afraid of intimacy  

Sexual frustration evaporating into the sky

Flesh burst, the loneliness floods bodies

In Miller Light and Shell gasoline

The New Orleans Holy Sepulchre Gentilly Stage

Poetry of Facebook-Live or it didn’t happen

A friend said, “New Orleans is a city very approximate to death.”

Hawaiian shirt Chicago insurance salesman

Aubrey Plaza look-alike

That’s Texas right there in guitar

Measuring Jazz Fest veterans by lack of cosmetics

Touch up mirror rookie cakes foundation cover up

Sunscreen drip beautiful confetti of madness

Nas with Soul Rebels Congo Square

New Orleans LA and Queens NY

With mis heromano poeta

Hip hop and brass band

Nas shirt: HSTRY don’t believe the hype

Son of the blues powwow

Obama blue and red Hope flag in the rear of the crowd

Feels like Revolution

Palestinian colors on the pole red, black, white and green without the star

Beethoven’s fifth and Lenna Horne

Pigeon step seventh ward borough of Queens

Primal hip hop libido drum

White boy in a Pelle Pelle shirt Notorious

Marijuana in mouth, raises a street-vendor-bought

Knock off Mumbai pastel umbrella selling white privilege

Weed to bystanders full frontal

Sanctimonious feral addict in a music parking lot

Second line pomp bud in teeth flaunt

Slicked shave hair flop orange tan

Finale and walk, to double dollar tip jars

Of young one’s brass in street for the New Orleans side hustle

Corner of Esplanade and Carrollton statue of

P.T.G. Beauregard on public land

One white man from Florida and one white woman

Full beard stern head, four flags in his hand bulldog at feet

Staked eight flags in earth variants of Confederacy sedition

She had confederate, a yellow Don’t Tread on Me

And in the palm a tiny Israeli flag

I spot pointing to my fellow poet

Eagle eye

Two black cops in the background

Cars passing, crowd unleashing

I stand middle finger up straight at white supremacists

Dos poetas walk around circle

Ask cops is this public property

Can anyone stand there?

Proceed, Engage

Mr. Graybeard says he goes around the South

Poet words explain state of Israel is funded by

America to bomb Palestinian people into a box

Genocide

Stars and Bars sedition

Genocide of black Americans

African genocide

Economic engine of free labor for not free people

She says, “11,000 Jews fought for the Confederacy

Blacks fought for the Confederacy, Shalom”  

I mention, “Slave revolts led to unstable continuation on two fronts

To that side that lost; you lost

This is my home; go back to yours; this city’s elected representatives

I pay taxes to have chosen.

Your ignorance is higher than that man on that horse

You are on the wrong side of history

With death.”

She touches my hand and calls me honey

I say, “Don’t fucking touch my hand.”

She says, “Don’t use that kind of language.”

I say, “Why are you more offended by the word fuck

implying sex miscegenation,

rather than the word genocide and the death you are promoting?

You are waving a flag with the rights

a country that does not agree with you gives you?”

And I think of the music

My father of saying, “Do not speak, just let it be.”

Of kissing lips and one love, of ‘Merica

Of Trumpland, of the goddamn war for capital T truth

Of hearts in the fire this time

Of it does not matter, I don’t want to know

Sometimes the truth is just a plain picture