Tag: poetry (page 1 of 4)

August 7, 2020 / 0 Comments

On Violence or, How Wolves Shape Rivers

To know how to change a mind, you must learn how to change a river.

One way to change a river is to introduce wolves into the ecology.

In 1995, the rivers of Yellowstone National Park were riotous and inhospitable. Along the banks of these turgid rivers thrived large herds of deer who lived an idyllic life. But this docile scene papered over an invisible violence.

Scientists, ever the gods of violence, introduced wolves in order to displace the deer. Imagine the hatred they must have felt towards the wolves for robbing them of their absolute liberty. To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.

The wolves were the de facto defenders of the forest. Those trees quintupled in size in just six years. Their roots embraced the river, caging it. Their branches welcomed new birds, new songs. They fell into the shape of dams, built by beavers, who could transform rot into home.

A more egalitarian ecosystem emerged where all could share in the gamble of life alike. Perhaps the deer secretly understood that their life of leisure was rapacious and unsustainable. Or perhaps they were bitter with spite like a general waging a war of attrition. One wonders what stories deer tell themselves.

We call this process widespread trophic cascade.

To change a mind, you must learn how to change a river.

One way to change a river is to introduce wolves into the ecology.

Scientists, ever the gods of violence, introduced wolves to displace the deer. Now, imagine the hatred they must have felt towards the wolves for robbing them of their absolute liberty. To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.

The wolves’ purpose was to defend the forest. Those trees quintupled in size in just six years. Their roots embraced the river, caging it. Their branches welcomed new birds, new songs. They died in the shape of dams, built by beavers, who could transform rot into home.

We call this process a widespread trophic cascade.
Similarly, for new pastures of understanding to emerge, there must be a widespread cognitive cascade.
To change a mind, you must know how to change a river.

Thoughts flow like water flows like rivers flow like rapids sometimes violent sometimes placid.

For every social justice movement to succeed, there must be wolves with teeth and trees with roots to strike a balance of violence in our tributaries of thought.

There must be patience for the slow growth of sustainable systemic change but also understanding for the violence of urgency. Because injustice affects real people in the real world right now. That’s why black lives matter right now. Why we must be idle no more when never again is right now.

For anything to have changed, Martin Luther King Jr., needed Malcolm X and Malcom X needed MLK.

King understood that the language of love could unite peoples against systems of oppression that were and are invisible to all us coddled white moderates, who freeze on matters of race like deer caught in headlights.

Malcolm X saw how racism was a forked-tongue language whose were themselves violent, whether they be a susurrus or a screech. He knew a Million Man march could not stop the local lynch mob, who understood only the lash of their tongue.

Together, despite their differences, the forest and the wolf bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice and became, for all of us, the better angels of our nature.

August 18, 2019 / 0 Comments

I’m not sure what to call ya

Father, I’m not sure what to call ya. Dad won’t stand,
Cause what Id rather have is a friend.
All my life, you fed me stipends instead of good sense – leaving me to tie up the loose ends of my messy youth and that may sound confused but only ’cause you’re not used to the wild ways a child appraises truth. Im not obtuse –
I always knew you were in cahootz with crude capitalists – you bump fists with fiscal fascists. You can’t cap and trade on climate change – its far too vicious, so fuck your wishlists!

The mining industry needs their free trade screed to feed their growth expectancies. You can’t see you’re greasing up once-green pastures for rapacious masters. Goddamn Old man, you on the attack, got mother Nature on her back when you shake hands with the damned from Goldman Sachs! Matter of fact, something must be missing for you to be digging the next seven generations such an early grave.

Growing up, all I ever heard you say was:
My house my rules sit down behave do as I say not as I do Im telling you Im through with these clownish tirades! Face the corner eat your dinner sit up straight, don’t make that face – you must be a humble winner. Hate the sin but love the sinner. And bulk up, I choke up when I see you thinner than your sister. Chin up, I raised you to be strong so you wouldn’t wither.

Amazed, I would naively kneel, learning how to pray, too juvenile to understand why my Mother couldn’t let you stay and because of their shared pain, I aged apart and away: too shallow were the roots of your religion, too hollow were the suits who signed off on your commission – I’ve been missing something I never even knew I had. This too shall pass.

You were gone too far too long when I was too young too soon for my two brothers and not to toot the horn of my ornery sister but she’s been torn apart too by the same half-farcical patriarchal diatribe that we had to contrive to fill in the details cuz in the end, you tried and failed to be my father, my Dad or my friend.

August 18, 2019 / 0 Comments

Questionable Questions

As the youngest of four, I was raised on questions.
You see, I was always last to understand, and so, I inevitably asked a lot of questions.

Like: what do you mean I shouldn’t lie?
or Why am I in trouble?
or Why don’t you want me to tell the truth?
or Why are you crying?
Who’s that? and what does that letter mean…for us..for you…for me?

But despite my insistent, wondering nature, there are many things I still do not know about my family.
Like…
Why my brother seems so much like my father, his face striving to cut those same sharp cheeks; to furrow a similar brow. I wonder how his mind must have captured and sealed away stark, signpost, still-life reliefs of my father’s way of being angry, a man who, for me, remains shrouded still in the penumbra of my secondhand memory. Did my brother need my father’s love to fill his heart so much that he mimed out angry outbursts as if they were no different from other words of kindness? When we were children, I must remember: my brother was also just a child. He knew not what he was doing.

Other questions nag still.
Like…
Why did my grandmother stay with her corpulent, boorish abuse for a husband when we blocked them in the parking lot of the assisted-living apartments with our vehicle – a slapdash intervention to prevent their surprise reunion. How did she resist the entreaties of her family as we contentiously pursued a condescending intolerance the like of which was unfamiliar to my quaking voice, in a winter not yet frigid enough to have me shaking like some last leaf of autumn. Weeks later, my grandma foisted up an answer. She said she stayed because of loneliness. All that time. In a house across the street from the graveyard. What is loneliness?

Did my grandma’s bullheadedness have anything to do with why my mother and sister were butting heads, or why my mom told me to tail my sister who was running out of doors to slam? She should have known I couldn’t keep up with her. Lacey was so much more my senior, colossal, with great strides and the rebellious brilliance of a teenager enthralled by her own presumptive independence. There was a question I remember asking myself repeatedly, after I was spotted by her and I failed my mission. I remember asking, “Why couldn’t I have been a better ninja?”, even though I returned home unnoticed by my mother.

Now, it seems to me the worst poems are written with unanswerable questions so I will try my best to rationalize some mystery.

I say, In all these lurid vignettes poorly lit by memory’s shadow, there was true filial love when we could remember to forget the faults of our family. Where pride, arrogance, and envy all dissolved in the acid of our jokes, the umami of thanksgiving dinners, and in the ambrosia of songs whose words we all knew like secular scripture. Yet, taken together, these questions remind me, in my youth as in my adulthood, I know nothing about my family.

August 18, 2019 / 1 Comment

Mon frère ne parle pas français

Veuillez entendre le poème ici

Ce poème est écrit en Français parce que mon frère ne parle pas français.
Mon accent peut provoquer des regrets, mais c’est le seul moyen d’expliquer mon secret.

Il est vrai que le langage amène l’âme à parler jusqu’à ce que la langue devienne plus musclée que le coeur, à force de partager nos torsions de langage.

Mais, comme un voyage ou comme nos premières peurs, nos heures sont limitées. Et c’est avec cet aveu clair que je raconte mon histoire cachée derrière la poésie voilée.
Sans paix, mon frère était méchant parce que mes parents ont séparés quant il avait seulement sept ans.
Ce fut un moment imprévu qui n’a jamais été résolu. Le fossé entre mes parents est encore absolu.

Ensuite, pendant ma jeunesse chez ma mère, mon frère a perturbé la santé de ma mentalité avec sa colère chaque matin.

Il était circadien comme le coq qui crie au soleil : « je vole votre sommeil »

Et il aurait beugler avec un visage vermeil: « Michael! Fuck off! »

Mais, je sais que nos identités sont enracinées dans les histoires de nos parents, chance, et nos croyances. Ainsi, l’ensemble de notre volonté et puissance est tissée dans une rivière de la causalité. Nous avons la liberté mais nous ne pouvons pas nager en amont. Nous ne choisissons pas notre nature.

Avant ma naissance, il y avait déjà des fissures entre ma futur mère et père. Le désespoir, dedans un poème ou devant le miroir, ou entre deux amoureux, vole la chaleur de nos feux spiritueux.

Et quand on a froid, il ne prend que les ombres des mois d’hiver, quand les nuits sont plus sévères, pour partager un silence avec les secrets qui habitent dans notre conscience. Et ces idées nous gèlent de l’intérieur.

Alors, je crois que mon frère a eu des engelures à partir des querelles frigides entre mes parents.

Comment pourrais-je donner un sens à sa froideur envers moi ?
Un glacier ne pousse que dans des eaux glaciales.
J’espère qu’un jour mes mots peuvent lui faire fondre mais de nos jours, je gèle quand je lui parle.

Et je sais que le changement est lent donc je vais essayer d’être patient mais jusqu’à ce qu’il m’écoute avec du respect, je ne serai pas en mesure de lui parler en anglais.

April 11, 2019 / 0 Comments

The Will of the People

A protest is obnoxious because being dirt poor in a wealthy country is obnoxious.

A protest is disruptive because billionaires are disruptive to every society.

A protest is goddamn loud because the clanging of empty pots will never ring louder than the hunger that cries out from empty bellies.

A protest is violent when the void of delayed justice is considered to be peace.

If you were an elected band council member of the Wet’suwet’en territory, would you let the oil and gas company encroach upon your ancestor’s lands, lands defined in spilled ink and spilled blood, so you can sustain the fraying clans that are alive and needful today? Or, if you were a hereditary clan chief, would you resist outright the insidious intrusion of surveyors and their company men presenting their Pandora’s box in a simple, auburn briefcase?

We can only imagine how such leaders shake their heads at night, aghast at the choices laid before them.

When noble leaders for noble causes are pitted one against another, a violent protest is born.

When there is no way out but oligarchy, gerontocracy, autocracy, monarchy, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, corporatocracy, theocracy, we say NO!

We will not be ruled by oligarchs, who plunder using the law; we won’t be ruled by old people, ignorant in their infinite wisdom; we won’t be ruled by autocrats and their goose-stepping quislings, or by monarchs and their divine, inbred families; we won’t be ruled by morons and idiots, or by thieves, banded together by their thieves’ honour; we won’t be ruled by corporations who worship Mammon, the god of wealth, or by theocrats, eternally washing the coagulated blood off of Mammon with their holy water.

When heavy metals rain, red rivers run, and hurricanes swell;
When antibiotics fail, anti-vaxxers prevail, and frogs go the way of bees;
When plastic rains, seed vaults sour, and the permafrost melts;
When fear feeds on drought and the seas thrash our cities;

We will eat the money, eat the money, green with envy, green, feverish and ravenous like hungry ghosts until our cheeks drool with machine oil, until our bellies distend and our throats tighten into straws so we roll the bills and insert them lengthwise, one at a time, hungry for more, forever more, swallowing serpentine cents upon cents until senseless.

Who among you can defend the defenseless?

February 23, 2019 / 0 Comments

Sea Change

Trying to hack this rap
As if I could rack up all my
thoughts in just one riff.
Still trip over my words with these flapping gums,
maybe ‘cuz the blunt ain’t done
And I’m fiending for another one,
but what’d I miss?

A verse so soft,
I could relive whatever it is
that lipsticked lips leave behind,
like a gentle kiss making me wish for a better time
when my mind was secure in its bliss,
not so quick to remiss,
or so swift to diss each thought as derelict crap.

Got that? ‘Cuz I didn’t. I’ll riff and still miss it.

Some flow got so much drow
You’d mistake it for a palindrome
still caught up searching for some meaning in the undertone.
Lost in my undertow.

Seeking a sea change, I rearranged
my life under a hail of endless tetris blocks,
wanting to rock somebody’s socks off
or prove that the whole world’s a crock.

Now, I’m just stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I’m in the caravan running on the fumes from tar sands,
and Iraqi oilways, far from grace, and yet still laced with rich veins;
We mine this land where justice leaves her own remains.

It’s over – we can’t sustain this limitless growth in select communities,
under lock and key, oh, tissue please, with stock issued priorities.
Hear them wonder: “Ah! What wars are lurking in my stock’s annuity?”
Here them ponder: “Ah! What’s so fucked about a neofeudal plutocracy?”

I can hear them mocking me. Me and my idealistic economic justice tendencies.
“Hey! How’s it feel to be a hippie hipster hip to our hypocrisies?”

I never thought there would be so few world leaders.
Or that the rich would need obedient good deeders.
I never thought great evil would be hiding in taxes.
I never knew how much destruction would be wrought by just plastics.

Paralyzed with hunger, I wonder, how to shop morally
as a concerned consumer when all of my groceries
are produced by fewer
than a dozen global companies
wringing out the juice like machines tuned
to consume at the rate of baby boomers.

Sooner or later, the temperature will
rise so fast it’s gonna surpass every ceiling and
steal the sky, leaving us all reeling
and kneeling in the dirt until we die.

And the next seven generations will forever ponder why.

So it goes, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust, thank you very much,
all our grandchildren will smirk, ironic ’til you blush,
cold to the touch, blaming all their civilizational clashes
on the climate tipped off-balance, and hand us this stanza:
so it goes, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, thank you very much.
All our grandchildren’s children will work against the rush
of flash floods, where no looming levee will ever be quite enough,
And their only crutch will be the refrain
which circles down the drain,
along with all the leaves of this sordid history,
so it goes, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust, thank you very much.

February 12, 2019 / 0 Comments

Can I Tell You a Secret?

We all love to keep hidden, secret things.
I don’t know why but I know that we must.
Maybe it’s a matter of truth or trust,
or a violent urge to make our dreams sing.

We peek beneath peat, wear curious masks,
read between lines, and bury notes in caskets.
We ask tragic questions. Did I mention
keeping secrets is a chosen profession?

But secrets all bear a revealing tell,
like a sonnet ended by its couplet
which conceals its own breast like a doublet
to cloak the sly spot where the heart does swell.

I do find myself best down a deep, dark well,

where I can hear my breath, and my being,
and hide myself from the prying sunlight.
Alone, to think, to dream of what’s right, and
open my eyes to what I’m not seeing.

It’s almost as if I am awake but dreaming.

Without this lone pillar of privacy,
I could not be me. I’d cease to exist
as a freethinker. I seek to enlist
you in my defense of strange secrecy

which, let’s be real here, is not a given.
So many people love lords and masters,
who want naught more than rank-and-file living,
and absolution from sinful pastors.

They suffer from missing peace in their heart
which means they fear what they cannot control,
like the great, mysterious works of art,
whose miracles I do hereby extol.

And I hope that you share in this delight,
for rotten swamps are brewing up monsters,
and we’ll need every voice in this next fight,
when we will confront the state-side mobsters

who know the secret to power is all
in the present control of the past;
when the story of our future does fall
into their hands, then the die has been cast.

When I spoke naught for the first, they came for me last.

February 5, 2019 / 0 Comments

Old Roots

It’s not hard to uncover that I hide my pain from others.
It’s not meant to be witnessed unless I have your confidence.

Poetry became a way for me to show off some of my pain.
To talk it down in public, so to speak.

I wanted to be publicly vulnerable.
Better yet, I wanted to be praised for being vulnerable.
I was easy prey so why not be applauded along the way?

Outside myself, far from who I was then, it’s clear I was an outsider.
That younger me knows I did not escape myself, the hider.

My ‘come to buddha’ moment was when I realized I could console someone else who was in pain.
Maybe, I told myself, if I could be understanding,
then I too could be understood.

Of course, I had this notion first with my mother, who was Atlas holding the roof above our many screaming heads.

Her mind a carousel of childrearing, always spinning to stay centered

I turned my newfound spirituality outward. Which is when my song of innocence ended and I began to perceive such strange suffering sinking behind so many eyes glassy as an egg being swallowed by a snake.

Worse still, when I tried to help others, I found their pain was stitched together by a home-brewed prophylactic and the reasons for their remedies or the source of their symptoms would get lost in translation no matter how earnest and loving our conversations.

When my song of wisdom began, I left my home town to study and to seek
the friends I knew I could one day have.
And I had them.
For a time.
But the old wounds lingered.
In me. In them.

Old roots wriggled and took hold.
Adult kids sought shelter from this this storm of a century in their parents’ nest.
But I could not. I could not have my hometown and I suspect it would not have me.

So instead, I weather the barren reaches of a random field alone drinking water from the air and vying for a melody or a tune that could land my pain home.

Perhaps, with one divine breath of air, I could sing a tune so lofty and sorrowful and sweet it would sail upon the tides of some languid weather system drifting between my abode and my father’s home, and he, ever the lazy lion on the Savannah, he might pause a moment to take in the air and instead hear this pressing, poetic tune and finally wonder about the inner life of his strangest son enough to beg the universe to grant him a single burning question.

And some notes are barely forming now like static electricity, I feel them first, on my fingertips, it’s a heat storm and so I reach for the words on the tip of my tongue and

February 4, 2019 / 1 Comment

Happy Birthday, Mom!

In my poems, you’re the titan Atlas,

enduring, “holding the roof o’er our heads”;

I’ve seen you master your torrid feelings

but know that you cry at night in your bed;

the same way everyone does.

I hope you can find a wellspring of hope,

the way a tied rope finds itself more rope –

beauty and love and joy suddenly spring,

just because.

November 11, 2018 / 0 Comments

Over/Under You

I feel like I need you all the time. Like you illuminate my world.

And that it makes me weak and dependant to say such a thing.

I feel like you’re giving me breadcrumbs when I need hot loaves.

I feel stupid and depressed. Like no one knows or understands what I am sad about. And that itll last forever.

Im frustrated that ive gone to pieces. Mostly, im surprised you left me as soon as you could leave me. I remember asking asking if you had already left before leaving.

I can’t survive on just texts. And planning feels so prescribed, impersonal.

I don’t know how to repair my heart after being rejected by one of the truest friends Ive ever known. I cant stop hearing you say that you dont find me attractive anymore or that you need to go live alone. And you seem so surprised when I tell you this as if those words wouldnt resonate and echo within any body, repeating themselves.

And I feel like you lied without lying. Like having an open secret or keeping mum. Did you just say comforting halftruths to escape my distraught in the moment? Were you just buying time until you left?

I wonder when I started to think of your displays of comfort so cynically and I am dismayed that I cant place the origin to these doubts. And how unfair Im being.

Was this year so bad? So different from all the rest? Did you grow so much that you grew to prefer other soil?

Richer soil? I ask myself. The grass is always greener over there so why wouldnt the soil be richer than mine. What is greater proof of loss than disinterest?

Its been too long since writing helped me through a hard time. Maybe ive been in denial about how hard its been. Or maybe I got soft. Or ive been crying too long about you or not enough. I could never tell. The answer depends on who you ask.

Im tired of having all these feelings alone when we were so happy to share in each others. At least, I felt happy to indulge you in your moods though sometimes I was humbled by your cavernous depths. And here I find myself spelunking alone in my own subterranean labyrinth with just the glowing embers of my crumbled heart to light my way. You’re the only one who knows Im here and how dark it is.

To your credit, you do pop in from above once in a while, flash me a glimpse of the lonely tunnels I must explore and smile invitingly, still from above, and beckon me forward as if I shouldnt be afraid.

And I feel weak for being afraid. And I fear what I’ll find in blindness.

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