Sugar Blues

The ONE poem I have, deliberately, withheld from publishing (in my books) because one day, I want to devote a whole book to the “concern” and donate all proceeds to an anti-rape organization yet to be determined.

Sugar Blues

My almost thirteen year old self was more overwhelmed
by the endless mug shots of black boys and men
than by the reason I was sitting at the cop’s desk
looking through myriad pictures
trying to pick out the one
who stole my virginity.

Under pressure, I finally picked out one
who looked similar enough.
How glad I was, during the trial,
that his teacher verified his whereabouts.

Decades later, the subject came up again
and it came to my attention that I wasn’t the only one.
It wasn’t only my shame, wasn’t only my affliction.
It was a community epidemic
that it had its source in hatred of the feminine;
whether young or old, virgin or whore.

So I can’t act like I don’t know
or treat it like some feminine malady
that has nothing to do with me.
I gotta be real, not divorce myself.

I saw an actor in a film say
women are the sweetness of life
but somewhere along the way
sugar blues has taken up residence.
We got diabetic rapists, saccharin pedophiles
and just plain glucose driven men.

So this is a call to action.
If you bout it, bout it
if you’re truly about revolution
truly about change
you need to step up to the plate
and recognize the rigged game
that has us all, men as well as women
losing our sense of community,
our sense of ourselves.

 

Land of Lincoln (They Say)

They say that Illinois is the land of Lincoln
And that Springfield is the heart of that land.

They say that Lincoln was ugly, morose and awkward
And that despite his character flaws he should be honored
For keeping the country together
For freeing Africans from chattel slavery.

They say, they say, they say
Until I can’t help being sickened.

Yes, Lincoln signed his name on a document
That nominally ended the American version of slavery
Once and for all

But he took a long and winding road to get there
And part of that road included a path off the beaten trail
Called the american colonization society
A society that didn’t want to participate any longer
In sucking the blood from Africans
A society that just wanted us to recross the Middle Passage
And take our black asses on home.

Lincoln found out that wasn’t feasible
the day he took office
and southern state after southern state
seceded from the union.

See, president after president
from the first to the fifteenth
consistently passed the buck on the question of slavery.
None of them had the werewithal
to disrupt the economy of the country
by dismantling slavery.

Northern mills manufactured the cotton
Produced from Africans enslaved on the plantations.
Coffee drinkers had their coffee sweetened
With the sugar produced from Africans enslaved
On the plantations.
No president could conceive the building of this country
Shouldn’t have to rely on the whip, the dogs, the blood soaked earth
The all-encompassing misery of African people
To make this country’s destiny manifest.

But they say that Lincoln had the courage of his convictions
And they say his convictions were inherent in the words
Of the declaration of independence.
They say he was The Great Emancipator

Lincoln signing his name on a piece of paper
Couldn’t stop Northern whites from rioting
Because they had to go to war
To free Africans.

Lincoln signing his name on a piece of paper
Couldn’t stop the South from beating the North
In battle after battle.

Lincoln signing his name on a piece of paper
Was a strategic move
To break the South economically.
If the South didn’t have the revenue produced by Africans
They wouldn’t be able to keep up with the cost of war.
That was the real reason behind Sherman’s march to the sea.

So on this day
When they have closed downtown Springfield
For the grand opening of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
When they say that Illinois is the Land of Lincoln
And Springfield is the heart of that land
After I get up from praying to the porcelain god
And rinse my mouth out
I take up my pen
And try to give you the real deal.

 

Excerpted from my book, In the Whirlwind

Related articles

 

Requiem for L

Requiem for L

Days of wine and roses
were never a part of my twenty-four
except once.

Understanding my need to sip and sniff,
he brought me Ethiopian honey wine
and Somali Rose incense.

Understanding his need to make a dollar
out of fifteen cents, I stood beside him
on Oakland corners selling good smells.

One hundred and thirty two moons
older than my post-summer of love birth,
he was my alpha.

Joyfully submitting, I laid under him
matching him movement for movement.
My lips curved a half moon when he said,
Sis, they told you wrong, you can dance.

I loved him so much
I laughingly sidestepped shyness
when my sister said I heard you two
smacking lips in the kitchen.

He was the beginning of my womanhood
and I turned out to be the end of his manhood.

Several copper-wire conversations later,
there was much sorrow in his voice
when he said, if I had known
you wanted to be a married woman
I would’ve married you.

Devoid of my essence, he took a header off
of a rickety staircase. I didn’t believe anything
anybody told me,
until I called his sister-friend.
She heard my name and went silent
and I knew…my alpha was dead.

Grief is perennial. It walks with me daily.

 

 

Excerpted from my third book, Contraband Marriage.

How Do You Build a Union for the 21st Century? (Step 1: Learn From History) – Sara Horowitz – The Atlantic

I was once a member of an union.  The union I was in didn’t follow the lead of labor activist Sidney Hillman. It was a “typical” style union in that it collected dues that it did who-knew-what with the dues it received. Therefore reading the article linked below was educational. I didn’t know there were unions that operated on the premise of social unionism. It’s an idea aligned with my world view and is more than appropriate to share on Labor Day. Enjoy. Relate. Reciprocate.

Do You Build a Union for the 21st Century? (Step 1: Learn From History) – Sara Horowitz – The Atlantic.

An Open Letter to Those Colleges and Universities that have Assigned Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as the “Common” Freshmen Reading for the Class of 2016 | Brown Town

An Open Letter to Those Colleges and Universities that have Assigned Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as the “Common” Freshmen Reading for the Class of 2016 | Brown Town.

Excerpt from the letter:

What makes the racism of Skloot’s account all the more insidious is that she could have foreclosed my accusation that she was unquestioningly  appropriating Henrietta Lacks’s body by admitting that Henrietta’s self-touching was, indeed, a fabrication, a “it-could-have-happened-like-this” situation. She could have admitted the unreliability of her narration. Instead of self-reflecting, Skloot turns the criticism outward, recounting in great detail how difficult it was for her to get Henrietta’s story. As a result, the black characters in her story are racialized but she is not. They have the problem with racial difference, not her. She has less to get over than them; she comes in earnestness; she can be trusted. So she says. And so we believe. We learn so much about the fears and hesitations of the Lacks’s family toward this white writer but nevertheless come to trust Skloot more than the Lackses; she is the voice of reason.  And so we come to suspend our disbelief and go on thinking that it is fine and ethical for her to rewrite Henrietta Lacks’s body in an intimate moment that may not, in fact, even have happened.  Yet the proclamation of the book’s truth content begs an analysis of Skloot.  What feelings of privilege and authority over another’s body must a writer possess in order to rewrite an already exploited body and call it “non-fiction”?

 

Alphabet Orchestra – S.J. Mallory

I read this beautiful poem by S.J. Mallory on Goodreads and requested his permission to post it here. If you agree with me on its beauty, please visit his website. Enjoy!

Alphabet Orchestra

The writer’s quest is to put into words
the burnished wonderment of a violin.
For his pencil to carve his lines on a blank page
like a bow cutting across tightly stretched guts.
Quietly making music that vibrates with dreams and regrets
and the timeless joy of the moment.
An alphabet orchestra
whose beauty is found only under a humble
chin.

La Guerre (5) ee cummings

La Guerre

V

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,had the haughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty         ,how

often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffetting thee that thou mightiest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

La Guerre (4) ee cummings

La Guerre

IV

little ladies more
than dead exactly dance
in my head,precisely
dance where danced la guerre.

Mimi à
la voix fragile
qui chatouille Des
Italiens

the putain with the ivory throat
Marie Louise Lallemand
n’est-ce pas que je suis belle
chéri? les anglais m’aiment
tous,les américains
aussi…”bon dos, bon cul de Paris”(Marie
Vierge
Priez
Pour
Nous)

with the
long lips of
Lucienne which dangle
the old men and hot
men se promènent
doucement le soir(ladies

accurately dead les anglais
sont gentils et les américains
aussi,ils payent bien les américains dance

exactly in my brain voulez-
vous coucher avec
moi? Non? pourquoi?)

ladies skillfully
dead precisely dance
where has danced la
guerre j’m’appelle
Manon,cinq rue Henri Monnier
voulez-vous coucher avec moi?
te ferai Mimi
te ferai Minette
dead exacgtly dance
si vous voulez
chatouiller
mon lézard ladies suddenly
j’m’en fous des nègres

(in the twilight of Paris
Marie Louise with queenly
legs cinq rue Henri
Monnier a little love
begs,Mimi with the body
like une boîte a joujoux,want nice sleep?
toutes les petites femmes exactes
qui dansent toujours in my
head dis-donc,Paris

ta gorge mystérieuse
pourquoi se promène-t-elle,pourquoi
éclate to voix
fragile couleur de pivoine?)

with the

long lips of Lucienne which
dangle the old men and hot men
precisely dance in my head
ladies carefully dead