About Me

Los Angeles, CA, United States
Hello Friend! Welcome to my poetry blog.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Thursday

I want my mother
to vote for Obama,
because she deserves
that freedom.

I want my grandmother,
to vote for a Democrat
for the first time in her life.

Imagine you are a Young Person,
in 1960, and JFK
Wins IT. And 3 years later,
his very mind is blown apart,
reduced to fractions, particles,
the unknown flesh
which ties ALL us niggaz
to reality,

and in your unspeakable.
rage.
you.
love...
you love,
in cities like san francisco, you
work - continue,
working (to put food on your family)
y'all, and you'ens TRY, TRY,
you try to remain human,

and time keeps slipping,
and your children, and theirs,
and the storefronts jigsaw in cubicles,
the typewritten tally of the day's receipts
become uniform, crunched
into X's and O's.
They firebomb the rice paddies.
You run a flower shop -
jackknifes into a cor-po-rate en-ti-ty.
Less blossoms than fades,
but you don't mourn it -

You are responsible, responsive,
dutiful, practical, logical -
you have a daughter,
with a name.

You see the numbers rise...

You see the good guys
make enemies, take potshots
and subsidies (rain makers, spillage),
but HOLD, grasping to
that little light of yours.

I want my mother to stand.
I want my barber to stand.
I want the comfortable
to stand, and say,
WE ARE NOT AFRAID
of losing everything we are not
AFRAID of dying we aren't opposed
to our end, or the mocking,
or the underdogging it up Mt.Cavalry
(sweet Jesus) or forcing a smile
at the devil himself.
Who only wanted debauchery.

We have beliefs, and they are ours.
We have wrought them over centuries,
they are sticker-stuck on the steamer trunks from Italy,
etched in the Austrian engine parts,
sewn in the Syrian carpets,
sown in the English garden rows,
wrapped in the china-dolls'
undergarments, lurking in the jungles and bouncing -
like gamma rays -
from the moon and back now,
stellar, radio-active, infrared...

They will not be commodified.
They will not be played against us.
They will not be sketched
by a court room sketch artist
and plastered onto our schoolwalls
like evidence.

You, who would speak of BELIEF
would do well to know our names,
would do well to fasten the boots
of humility, tightly and march with us.

No talk, lest it be humble.
No thought, lest it be honorable.
No law, lest it be painstakingly crafted.
Our policies will be as exquisite
as Faberge eggs on icebergs,
as needlepoint sails,
as diamond-tipped rocket ships
running guns to the better angels,
made to be ridden
by mice wearing clover.

Don't, do not ignore
what your heart is surely screaming.

Do not ignore that which,
by now, must be a terrifying cry
bellowing in your night.